The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I never want my kids to read this’
Linda Boström Knausgård’s life was laid bare in her ex-husband’s novels – now she tells her side
L ‘ike restarting a computer”: that’s how Linda Boström Knausgård’s doctors described the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) used to treat her bipolar disorder between 2013 and 2017. Institutionalised in Stockholm against her will, the Swedish author was repeatedly sedated and zapped with “medicinal” electricity.
“I discovered I was losing my memory quite soon,” she says. “But they tell you that’s because you’re in a manic or depressed state. They tell you not to research the effects of ECT online. They tell you your memory is coming back. When I realised it was not coming back, the doctor said: ‘Well, you’re a writer. Make it up!’ Can you imagine…?”
In her brilliant third novel, October Child, Boström Knausgård describes coming around after ECT:
You’ve been pushed into bed or have climbed off the gurney yourself, still asleep before the scream you scream finally wakes you. You don’t know where you are. Where are you? Why don’t you recognise anything? The fear upon waking – until, finally, fully conscious, you realise that what you’ve woken up to is far worse than your dreams.
This state-sanctioned trauma was not the first time that Boström Knausgård found herself at the mercy of someone else’s narrative. Between 2009 and 2018, her thenhusband, Karl Ove Knausgaard, exposed the intimate details of their life together in six, sprawling autobiographical novels known collectively as My Struggle. In prose one critic described as “weirdly selfdeprecating and breathtakingly egoistic”, he made public every facet of their early romance, the daily grind of parenthood, their fights, her depression, her guilt and the overdose she took while pregnant with their fourth child.
“She always wanted something else,” he wrote. “Never did anything to improve things, just moaned, moaned, moaned.” His books were so popular that it has been estimated that a tenth of the population own one in his native Norway. Although even his biggest fans joke about the level of unfiltered mundanity in My Struggle – from dish-washing to defecation – many critics were bowled over by it. Zadie Smith admitted she finished each instalment craving the next one “like crack”.
Karl Ove’s uncle condemned his public airing of family issues as “verbal rape”. An ex-girlfriend of four years, described in his books under the pseudonym “Gunvor”, told Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende: “It was as if he said: ‘Now I’m going to punch you in the face. I know it’s going to hurt, and I will drive you to the hospital afterwards. But I’m going to do it anyway.’”
But despite calling him a narcissist in Vanity Fair last year, Boström Knausgård has always defended her now ex-husband’s decision to write about their lives. “She found me writing about her hard but acceptable,” Karl Ove told the Evening Standard after their separation in 2018. “Many people are upset or frustrated because they are reduced in books. Linda didn’t get that. When I started she said, ‘You can do it, just don’t make me a bore’.”
She’s far from a bore when I call her at her publisher’s office in Stockholm this week. Her voice is low and musical, her answers considered but also, understandably, guarded. October Child is the third novel in which she has, to some extent, fictionalised aspects of her own traumatic life.
The literary opposite of her exhusband’s unfiltered splurging, Boström Knausgård’s books are short, restrained and deliberately ambiguous. Reviewers compare her sentences to cool streams, or to piles of kindling ready to catch fire. Karl Ove’s novels, she tells me, “were fiction, only it was all true”. Whereas her own work bends more to the arc of art.
“I use what works,” she says, with typical concision. “Fiction is freedom. You can change things to be faithful to the writing process. You don’t have to be this documentary where everything has to be exactly true…”
Born in Stockholm in 1972, Boström Knausgård was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 26. “The diagnosis was very shocking to me,” she says, “because my father was bipolar and I had seen what he went through. I didn’t want that to happen to me. But, yes, it did.”
She tells me that her parents met “when people still went to dance outside. My mother said she could sense my father was sick before they got married but she didn’t really understand it. She said to herself: this is not normal.”
Reading between the lines of the new book, her mother – who died last year – was not all that “normal” herself. She was an actress and, as her daughter has said, “as little a narcissist as an actress can be”. As the narrator of October Child puts it:
My mother was never honest about herself. She was adaptable and offered everyone sweet, happy smiles, which was appreciated. She marched on behalf of women’s rights, of course, but she wasn’t really engaged. Not like other women. It’s not like she had the time. Her time went into the theatre, into keeping me and my brother close to her, and into parrying my father’s actions.
Today, Boström Knausgård tells me that although her early years were “very happy”, much of her childhood was dominated by fear of what her father might do next. “He was a very nice man when he wasn’t ill,” she says. “But he could do things… breaking things and jumping through windows. It was a difficult mix for a child to understand.”
Her mother was reluctant to let the authorities know about the danger. Intead, the family handled it themselves, often badly. Boström Knausgård says she has “a lot of memories of being alone with him when he was very ill”.
On one “scary” occasion – fictionalised in her second novel Welcome to America – her father left on the gas for days. On another, he insisted she sit in a chair while he sang a number from Cabaret. “On and on. And I sat there until I wet myself.” She pauses; her pauses are long. “He didn’t want me to go to sleep because he did need my company. Or he needed an audience. He didn’t want to stop, and maybe he was afraid of falling down, the depression…”
At the theatre, with her mother, was where little Linda felt safest “because my father couldn’t come there and do something horrible. They wouldn’t let him in. And I liked being with my mother when I was small. I wanted to be with her all the time. It was a bit annoying for her, but I followed her as often as I could. I was fascinated by the happenings, the words on stage, although I didn’t understand everything.”
She liked to sit by the prompter, reassured by her proximity to the script. There, unlike in the rest of her life, the child always knew what was coming next.
Eventually, even the safety of the theatre was shattered when her mother played Electra, losing her mind in Lars Norén’s Orestes in 1979. “I was only a kid,” she says “and in this play my mother was almost naked. You could see through her dress and then she went crazy. That was horrifying. I was thinking: ‘My father was sick so my mother can’t be sick.’ I didn’t like it at all.”
October Child whooshes readers through all these experiences. The childhood anxiety, the strange, calm sense of detachment that descended in adulthood. “Why did I take every pill I had and hide them in a glass that morning?” the narrator asks one of the nurses on the psychiatric ward. “How could I do that, Maria? I was pregnant. The children were sleeping in the next room.”
In his books, Karl Ove often addresses his narrative to a “you” that appears to be Boström Knausgård. In her writing, she responds. The wife in October Child acknowledges that her husband will “never forgive” her for the overdose. “I understand,” she says. “You will never stop blaming me for this.”
Although the child she was carrying is born healthy, the husband later looks his wife in the eye and asks for a divorce. “I won’t be able to handle it,” she thinks, and finds herself falling “from one moment to the next, each more horrific than the previous. I saw the children all in a row, much smaller than they actually were. Thin arms, unblinking eyes. Then these words tumbling through me: ‘This too I must bear.’” A few pages later she exposes the “lies” the couple fed to their children: the breakup was mutual, happy, everybody would be fine.
A fan of both authors’ books, I nevertheless read them with a lurking terror of how their four children will react if they choose to dip in. Linda says that she doesn’t think her children – who now live in London with their father and his third wife, publishing director of Jonathan Cape – have read her latest novel.
“They avoid…” she says. “I don’t think they have looked at it. That’s very healthy not to be that interested in their parents’ books. I don’t want them to read this. Ever.”
The people she does want to read the book are those responsible for Sweden’s “criminal” ECT programme. “I was listening to Swedish radio the other day and it said 40 people lost their memories from ECT last year. I do know people who have been helped [by the treatment], so it can work. But it should be a choice. If you are there by force, because you are not making sense out in society, then you can’t refuse ECT. It’s a horrible thing to force somebody to do. But they do it all the time.”
Boström Knausgård tells me that her experiences of ECT play into a recurrent nightmare she has: “I’m at the beach, it’s a sunny day. My mother and my friends are there. Then I swim out and the water becomes dark, almost black, a wall of water like a tsunami coming towards me. That is the most horrible dream. Terrifying.”
And yet, she stresses, the doctors “tell you that your brain is a computer. It is not a computer. You cannot reset it. You are a real person.”
‘My memory didn’t return after ECT. The doctor said, “You’re a writer, make it up!”’