Fear of crying outweighed the humiliation of a father’s mocking

Evidence

The shame of being on the verge of tears at the age of fifteen, soon sixteen, was stronger than the ignominy of his mimicking me. I did not usually cry any more, but my father had a hold on me that I never succeeded in breaking. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Prefigures the father’s undoing and the lifelong grip the narrator describes across the memoir. — connects to: Shame about public mockery drove a hero to abandon his own child — , A Year of World Stories, 10962