For his family, visible impropriety was more socially dangerous than actual impropriety

Evidence

In this house where we had always been so careful to prevent others from prying, where we had always been so careful to be beyond reproach in everything that could be seen, from clothes to garden, from house front to car to children’s behaviour, the closest you could come to the absolutely unthinkable was to exhibit a bottle of booze in a brightly lit window. That was why they, and eventually I too, laughed as we did. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2264

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the family’s facade-maintenance theme seen throughout Knausgaard’s My Struggle project.