Sharon Horgan: ‘I want adventures. I want to do stuff that's challenging’
Sharon Horgan doesn’t especially enjoy watching herself on screen any more. She feels an awkwardness that, she thinks, comes from years of sitting in edit suites scrutinising take after take of television programmes she has created, co-written and starred in. Shows such as Pulling, a black comedy about three female flatmates that first aired in 2006 and was her breakthrough. And Catastrophe, the Channel 4 series (rejected by the BBC) that she made with Rob Delaney about a one-night stand with long-term effects that ran for four seasons and has been broadcast in 133 countries and now means she has to have clocks in her London offices showing the time in New York and Los Angeles. But Horgan, who is 49 and has eviscerating selfawareness, also accepts that “vanity” might be a factor.
“I just don’t love seeing myself as an older person on screen,” she says, with a snorty half-laugh that seems to punctuate her most radically honest statements. “There’s always a weird transitional period where you go from being able to play a girl who doesn’t know where her life is going to playing the mother of an 18-year-old. The adjustment for that just takes a little bit of time.”
Horgan is sitting in the boardroom of Merman, the production company she founded in 2014 with producer Clelia Mountford. It’s a large, grown-up room with a view of the London Eye and a clutch of awards dotted around, but casually. She’s wearing a black vest, wide-legged jeans and Adidas shelltoes, and looks unfussily chic. “I generally like to pick up my clothes from the floor from the night before and wear them for as long as possible,” she explains. “It’s fine when I’m at home, but if I come in here three days in a row and I’m wearing the same thing, people point it out.”
We’re here to talk about Military Wives, which she stars in with Kristin Scott Thomas, and in which she plays, as it happens, the mother of an 18year-old. It’s a dramatisation, by theFull Monty director Peter Cattaneo, of the true story of the women from a Royal Marines base in Devon who formed a choir while their partners were away in Afghanistan and wound up the Christmas No 1 in 2011.
So, has Horgan seen it yet? “I didn’t watch it at the premiere,” she admits. “But my PR lady said, ‘You cannot go into interviews to talk about the film if you haven’t seen it.’ So I got them to send me a screener and I watched it on my laptop, which I’m sure Peter absolutely abhorred.”
What did she think? “Kristin and I had the same experience when we read the initial script: it fucked both of us up,” Horgan says. “We knew that if they were the right songs, if they were done in the right way, that this female friendship – the female version of a bromance – could be a really moving and sweet and funny and life-affirming film. So, yeah, when I watched it, I thought: ‘It’s all those things I thought it would be.’”
While Military Wivesfollows a familiar formula, you would have to have a black heart – something, admittedly, Horgan has been accused of – not to have to wipe away a small tear by the end. Horgan is the best thing about it, undercutting any hoariness with a curl of her lip or a withering aside. (She didn’t officially work on the script, but with Scott Thomas she did “inject a bit of us into it”.) Military Wivesprobably won’t do the full Full Montyin terms of impact, but there’s a calendar-girls, potato-peel-pie-society market for it. “Different films, but similar ingredients,” says Horgan. “It just makes people feel good.”
Military Wivesis a tonal departure for her; “uplifting” and “feel-good” haven’t exactly been in her wheelhouse. Horgan has summed up her work as being “funny and grim”, but what makes her comedy rare is how much she makes you care about her characters, even when they are behaving abominably. The relationship between Rob and Sharon in Catastrophe feels real – screwed up but real. “You let me put my penis in your mouth, but you won’t let me put my T-shirts in your drawer?” Rob notes when they start living together. The interactions between the parents in her BBC2 comedy Motherland are excruciating variations of ones you see at the school gates, especially if you are a bit middle-class. Horgan has an unerring ear and an unsparing eye.
“I watched the trailer for Military Wiveswith my 16-year-old daughter and she laughed all the way through it,” says Horgan. “And I was like, ‘Fucking cow.’ And she was like, ‘No, it’s great. It’s just funny seeing you with this beautiful song running throughout and then cutting to you on a keyboard and then cutting to you with your head in your hands. It’s just funny. You have to admit it’s funny.’”
It is kind of funny, Horgan concedes. Military Wivesis a step change to what she’s done before, but she has her reasons for branching out. Merman exists because Horgan was fed up with coming up with ideas, writing them, and then taking them to someone else to make them. The company started slowly, but in the past five years it has become an industry powerhouse. Its productions are ubiquitous on TV channels and streaming services, and it is known especially for developing new female talent. These include shows that Horgan co-writes, but doesn’t appear in, such as Motherland, and Divorcewith
Sarah Jessica Parker for HBO, but also Aisling Bea’s This Way Up, Frayedby Sarah Kendall and There She Goes, which won a Bafta for Jessica Hynes. Merman has also moved into drama and films: its first feature, Herself, by Irish writer and actor Clare Dunne, premiered last month at the Sundance Film Festival and was bought by Amazon.
“I’ve spent so many years doing things that were always called cult comedies,” explains Horgan. “So it’s nice to do something that will have a bigger audience. And being cynical and business-minded, it helps your profile when I go into pitches here and in the US. If you’re going in with a writer who is maybe less well known, who you’re wanting people to take a chance on, people give a shit about that.”
Horgan sounds conflicted. She notes that Catastrophe, as popular as it was, probably had “half the numbers” of a comedy like Derry Girls. She’s dabbled in big studio films before, but in supporting roles, notably the 2018 comedy Game Night, with Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, and knows that these parts come with much less control than she’s used to. It appears that Horgan is nailing that hard-to-square feat of allying a rich, diverse creative life with commercial success, but she’s unsure whether to focus her energies on acting or writing or producing or directing, or just to continue, like now, doing all of them.
“The weird thing I fight in myself is going after a mainstream audience and also thinking that I’m not entirely sure I know how to write for a mainstream audience,” she says. “The sweet spot is to do that and to do it well. And to do it in a way that you’re not compromising. But there’s something very intoxicating about creating a show that has widespread appeal. You do want people to see your work.”
At any point, Horgan might be working on a mind-boggling 30 projects. It’s hard not to trace this demented pace to the fact her career kicked off relatively late, in her mid-30s. She was born in east London, but moved to Ireland when she was four. The family settled in County Meath, north of Dublin, where they had a turkey farm. “I wanted to be a performer, but it didn’t feel possible,” she says. “I think that’s why it took so long. I mean, I had a lovely childhood and my parents were super-supportive, but if you’re brought up in a tiny village and your parents are turkey farmers, it doesn’t necessarily equate that you go into show business.”
Horgan went to art college in Dublin, hung out with bands, did some backing singing. “At one gig, this crazy Swiss producer came up to me at the end and was like, ‘I’m gonna make you a star. So, I flew with him to Zurich and he spent the week doing publicity photos, introducing me to people and trying to find out what my talents were.” Horgan laughs, “So, after that week, I was like, ‘Oh well, this is what happens to me. People walk up to me and say, I’m going to make you a star.’ That handicapped me for years.”
Instead, Horgan moved to London and worked at the Jobcentre in Kilburn, north London, for six years in her 20s. She only quit, aged 27, when she was instructed to pick up human excrement from the pavement outside. She moved around squats with Irish friends, before eventually renting a room in cooperative housing with a teacher and a nurse.
“When I moved to London, I think I really was genuinely coming over not to make my fortune, but to be discovered,” she says. “And I literally just got a job in the Jobcentre. I don’t know who I thought was going to discover me there.”
Horgan ultimately poured the energy of this chaotic, feckless period into Pulling, the sitcom she wrote with Dennis Kelly. She and Kelly had worked on sketches together in the 90s, won the BBC New Comedy Award in 2001, and began contributing material to Monkey Dust, Harry Thompson and Shaun Pye’s subversive animated series for BBC Three. The late Thompson (instrumental in launching Have I Got News For You and developing the character Ali G) had a sitcom title, Pulling, but no characters or plot, and suggested that Horgan and Kelly fill in the gaps.
Pulling wasn’t exactly autobiographical, but some true stories found their way in: yes, Horgan once ate a takeaway she found in a phonebox. Around the time that Pulling was coming together, she met Jeremy Rainbird, who worked in advertising. Six months later she was pregnant, and not long after that they were married. They have two children, Sadhbh, 16, and Amer, 11. If some of this feels familiar, it might be because parts of it were the starting point for Catastrophe, which follows the characters Sharon and Rob from messy hook-up to messy, just different, life with children.
We’re evicted from the “posh room” we’re in, which is needed for a meeting, so we scuttle across the landing to a writers’ space. It’s much smaller, there’s no view of the London Eye, and there’s a whiteboard on the wall and a sofa at one end. “There will be a bit of time where you run out of ideas and you just need to lie down,” she says.
While writing Pulling and Catastrophe, she shared a single keyboard with Kelly and Delaney respectively; she and Kelly would share the typing, but with Delaney it was always Horgan. It’s a draining way to work, but it has advantages: you receive immediate, brutal-if-necessary feedback, and there’s the drive of trying to make the other person laugh.
There are occasional rumours that Catastrophe will return in some form, perhaps as a one-off special, but that’s not on Horgan’s schedule. “I’d love to write with Rob again,” she says. “We just fitted so well together. But we also spent five years writing something that was quite intense, and it’s good to step away and do other things. So I’m my own partner right now, and yeah, that’s OK.”
Horgan considers PullingandCatastropheas chapter one and two of a trilogy. What form the third installment will take is something she’s wrestling with now. Both professionally and personally, 2019 was a tough year: Catastrophe ended, and so did her marriage to Rainbird. “After Catastrophe, I knew I’d have a period where I was like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,’” she says. “It was grand because I had so many other things, like Motherland and This Way Upand lots of Merman stuff, but I was also like, ‘Shit, I don’t have that thing. I don’t have that idea.’ And I was trying to not give myself a hard time about it, trying to just wait and see what came.”
On Catastrophe, Horgan and Delaney abided by one directive: make nothing up. It was designed to stop them slipping into cliché, and however gruelling it is to stick to, Horgan thinks it’s worth it. “I feel when I write about what’s either going on in my life or has gone on in my life, I just connect to it way more, have more stuff to say,” she says. “It also provides me with a little extra therapy, getting stuff down on the page.
“I really want to write about what it is to be a woman of a certain age whose life is changing,” she goes on. “And I want there to be a teenagers’ element to it. But I don’t want to write about my girls, because I think that’s just not fair. Also, I don’t want to start watching them the way I watch everyone else. You know, when you’re in the moment, but also part of your brain is thinking, ‘I must scribble that down later.’ So I’m trying to find a way round that, probably by giving the kids a different gender.”
Horgan sounds like she is happiest when writing. “It’s like the ultimate escape,” she says. “You open your laptop and immediately you’re somewhere else.” But 2020 is already filling up. he’s in the film adaptation of the hit musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and is about to start shooting a romantic comedy, the Last Drop, opposite Vince Vaughn. She’s also in advanced discussions to direct her first feature, The New World, an adaptation of Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz’s sci-fi novel.
“I just want some adventures,” she explains. “To do stuff that’s challenging.
You can get into a bit of a rut in terms of what you write about and what your safe space is. So yeah, just take a few risks. It’s weird, with the directing thing, I’ve done it a few times, but every time I do it, I think I can’t do it. So it’s like ignoring the negative side of my brain and continuing to push it.
“But then I also want to take my foot off the pedal a bit, so all that doesn’t make any sense,” Horgan continues. Then there’s that half-laugh again: “I want to get my daughter’s
GCSEs out the way and come out the other side and have a happy, non-stressful home.”
Military Wives
March is released on 6
Styling by Frederika Lovelle Pank; hair by Hamilton Stansfield at slreps.com using Philip B Haircare; makeup by Justine Jenkins using Delilah Cosmetics
bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.
We sat there on the hard mosaic floor, knowing exactly what we would do. We would change everything. We would find the way back to Greta, no matter the cost. The situation called for more than words and feelings. A closing of accounts. A clean break.
“How are you feeling?” Svante asked. “Do you want to keep going?” “No.”
“OK. Fuck this. No more,” he said. “We’ll cancel everything. Every last contract,” Svante went on. “Madrid, Zurich, Vienna, Brussels. Everything.”
One Saturday soon afterwards, we decide we’re going to bake buns, all four of us, the whole family, and we’re determined to make this work. It has to. If we can bake our buns as usual, in peace and quiet, Greta will be able to eat them as usual, and then everything will be resolved, fixed. It’s going to be easy as pie. Baking buns is after all our favourite activity. So we bake, dancing around in the kitchen so as to create the most positive, happiest bun-baking party in human history.
But once the buns are out of the oven the party stops in its tracks. Greta picks up a bun and sniffs it. She sits there holding it, tries to open her mouth, but… can’t. We see that this isn’t going to work.
“Please eat,” Svante and I say in chorus. Calmly, at first. And then more firmly. Then with every ounce of pentup frustration and powerlessness. Until finally we scream, letting out all our fear and hopelessness. “Eat! You have to eat, don’t you understand? You have to eat now, otherwise you’ll die!”
Then Greta has her first panic attack. She makes a sound we’ve never heard before, ever. She lets out an abysmal howl that lasts for over 40 minutes. We haven’t heard her scream since she was an infant.
I cradle her in my arms, and Moses lies alongside her, his moist nose pressed to her head. Greta asks, “Am I going to get well again?”
“Of course you are,” I reply.
“When am I going to get well?” “I don’t know. Soon.”
On a white sheet of paper fixed to the wall we note down everything Greta eats and how long it takes for her to eat it. The amounts are small. And it takes a long time. But the emergency unit at the Stockholm Centre for Eating Disorders says that this method has a good long-term success rate. You write down what you eat meal by meal, then you list everything you can eat, things you wish you could eat and things you want to be able to eat further down the line.
It’s a short list. Rice, avocados and gnocchi.
School starts in five minutes. But there isn’t going to be any school today. There isn’t going to be any school at all this week. Yesterday Svante and I got another email from the school expressing their “concern” about Greta’s lack of attendance, despite the fact that they were in possession of several letters from both doctors and psychologists explaining her situation.
Again, I inform the school office of our situation and they reply with an email saying that they hope Greta will come to school as usual on Monday so “this problem” can be dealt with. But Greta won’t be in school on Monday. Because unless a sudden dramatic change occurs she’s going to be admitted to Sachsska children’s hospital next week.
Svante is boiling gnocchi. It is extremely important that the consistency is perfect, otherwise it won’t be eaten. We set a specific number of gnocchi on her plate. It’s a delicate balancing act; if we offer too many our daughter won’t eat anything and if we offer too few she won’t get enough. Whatever she ingests is obviously too little, but every little bite counts and we can’t afford to waste a single one.
Then Greta sits there sorting the gnocchi. She turns each one over, presses on them and then does it again. And again. After 20 minutes she starts eating. She licks and sucks and chews: tiny, tiny bites. It takes for ever.
“I’m full,” she says suddenly. “I can’t eat any more.”
Svante and I avoid looking at each other. We have to hold back our frustration, because we’ve started to realise that this is the only thing that works. We’ve explored all other tactics. Every other conceivable way. We’ve ordered her sternly. We’ve screamed, laughed, threatened, begged, pleaded, cried and offered every imaginable bribe. But this seems to be what works the best.
Svante goes up to the sheet of paper on the wall and writes:
Lunch: 5 gnocchi. Time: 2 hours and 10 minutes.
Not eating can mean many things. The question is what. The question is why. Svante and I look for answers. I spend the evenings reading everything I can find on the internet about anorexia and eating disorders. We’re sure it’s not anorexia. But, we keep hearing that anorexia is a very cunning disorder and will do anything to evade discovery. So we keep that door wide open.
I speak endlessly to the children’s psychiatry service (BUP), the healthcare information service, doctors, psychologists and every conceivable acquaintance who may be able to offer the least bit of knowledge or guidance.
At Greta’s school there’s a psychologist who is experienced with autism. She talks with both of us on the phone and says that a careful investigation must still be conducted, but in her eyes – and off the record – Greta shows clear signs of being on the autism spectrum. “High-functioning Asperger’s,” she says.
Meeting after meeting follows where we repeat our story and explore our options. We talk away while Greta sits silently. She has stopped speaking with anyone except me, Svante and Beata. Everyone really wants to offer all the help they can but it’s as if there’s no help to be had. Not yet, at least. We’re fumbling in the dark.
After two months of not eating Greta has lost almost 10kg, which is a lot when you are rather small to begin with. Her body temperature is low and her pulse and blood pressure clearly indicate signs of starvation. She no longer has the energy to take the stairs and her scores on the depression tests she takes are sky high. We explain to our daughter that we have to start preparing ourselves for a stay at the hospital, where it’s possible to get nutrition and food without eating, with tubes and drips.
In mid-November there’s a big meeting at BUP. Greta sits silently. As usual. I’m crying. As usual. “If there are no developments after the weekend then we’ll have to admit you to the hospital,” the doctor says.
On the stairs down to the lobby Greta turns round. “I want to start eating again.” All three of us burst into tears and we go home and Greta eats a whole green apple. But nothing more will go down. As it turns out, it’s a little harder than you think to just start eating again. We take a few careful, trial steps and it works. We inch forward. She eats tiny amounts of rice, avocado and bananas. We take our time. And we start on sertraline, an antidepressant.
“Do they always look at you that way?”
“Don’t know. Think so.”
Svante and Greta have been at the end-of-term ceremony at school where they tried to make themselves invisible in the corridors and stairwells. When students openly point and laugh at you – even though you’re walking alongside your parent – then things have gone too far. Way too far.
At home in the kitchen, Svante explains to me what they’ve just experienced while Greta eats her rice and avocado. I get so angry at what I hear that I could tear down half the street we live on with my bare hands, but our daughter has a different reaction. She’s happy it’s in the open.
She devotes the whole Christmas break to telling us about unspeakably awful incidents. It’s like a movie montage featuring every imaginable bullying scenario. Stories about being pushed over in the playground, wrestled to the ground, or lured into strange places, the systematic shunning and the safe space in the girls’ toilets where she sometimes manages to hide and cry before the break monitors force her out into the playground again. For a full year, the stories keep coming. Svante and I inform the school, but the school isn’t sympathetic. Their understanding of the situation is different. It’s Greta’s own fault, the school thinks; several children have said repeatedly that Greta has behaved strangely and spoken too softly and never says hello. The latter they write in an email.
They write worse things than that, which is lucky for us, because when we report the school to the Swedish schools inspectorate we’re on a firm footing and there’s no doubt that the inspectorate will rule in our favour.
I explain to Greta that she’ll have friends again, later. But her response is always the same. “I don’t want to have a friend. Friends are children and all children are mean.”
Greta’s pulse rate gets stronger and finally the weight curve turns upwards strongly enough for a neuropsychiatric investigation to begin.
Our daughter has Asperger’s, highfunctioning autism and OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. “We could formally diagnose her with selective mutism, too, but that often goes away on its own with time,” the doctor tells us. We aren’t surprised. Basically, this was the conclusion we drew several months ago.
On the way out, Beata calls to tell us she’s having dinner with a friend, and I feel a sting of guilt. Soon we’ll take care of you too, darling, I promise her in my mind, but first Greta has to get well.
Summer is coming, and we walk the whole way home. We almost don’t even need to ration the burning of calories any more.
Six months after Greta received her diagnosis, life has levelled out into something that resembles an everyday routine. She has started at a new school. I’ve cleared my calendar and put work on the back burner. But while we’re full up with taking care of Greta, Beata’s having more and more of a tough time. In school everything is ticking along.
But at home she falls apart, crashes. She can’t stand being with us at all any more. Everything Svante and I do upsets her and in our company she can lose control. She is clearly is not feeling well.
One day near her 11th birthday I find her standing in the living room, hurling DVDs from the bookshelf down the spiral staircase to the kitchen. “You only care about Greta. Never about me. I hate you, Mum. You are the worst bloody mother in the whole world, you bloody fucking bitch,” she screams as
Jasper the Penguin hits me on the forehead. It’s autumn 2015 when Beata undergoes an evaluation for various neurodevelopmental disorders. She is diagnosed with ADHD, with elements of Asperger’s, OCD and ODD [oppositional defiant disorder]. Now that she has the diagnosis it feels like a fresh start for her, an explanation, a redress, a remedy. At school she has marvellous teachers who make everything work. She doesn’t have to do homework. We drop all activities. We avoid anything that may be stressful. And it works. Whatever happens we must never meet anger with anger, because that, pretty much always, does more harm than good. We adapt and we plan, with rigorous routines and rituals. Hour by hour. We try to find habits that work.
The fact that our children finally got help was due to a great many factors. In part it was about existing care, proven methods, advice and medication. It was also thanks to our own toil, patience, time and luck that Greta and Beata found their way back on their feet. However, what happened to Greta in particular can’t be explained simply by a psychiatric label. In the end, she simply couldn’t reconcile the contradictions of modern life. Things simply didn’t add up. We, who live in an age of historic abundance, who have access to huge shared resources, can’t afford to help vulnerable people in flight from war and terror – people like you and me, but who have lost everything.
In school one day, Greta’s class watches a film about how much rubbish there is in the oceans. An island of plastic, larger than Mexico, is floating around in the South Pacific. Greta cries throughout the film. Her classmates are also clearly moved. Before the lesson is over the teacher announces that on Monday there will be a substitute teaching the class, because she’s going to a wedding over the weekend, in Connecticut, right outside of New York. “Wow, lucky you,” the pupils say. Out in the corridor the trash island off the coast of Chile is already forgotten. New iPhones are taken out of fur-trimmed down jackets, and everyone who has been to New York talks about how great it is, with all those shops, and Barcelona has amazing shopping too, and in Thailand everything is so cheap, and someone is going with her mother to Vietnam over the Easter break, and Greta can’t reconcile any of this with any of what she has just seen.
She saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO2 emissions with her naked eye. The invisible, colourless, scentless, soundless abyss that our generation has chosen to ignore. She saw all of it – not literally, of course, but nonetheless she saw the greenhouse gases streaming out of our chimneys, wafting upwards with the winds and transforming the atmosphere into a gigantic, invisible garbage dump.
She was the child, we were the emperor. And we were all naked.
‘You celebrities are basically to the environment what anti immigrant politicians are to multicultural society,” Greta says at the breakfast table early in 2016. I guess it’s true. Not just of celebrities, but of the vast majority of people. Everyone wants to be successful, and nothing conveys success and prosperity better than luxury, abundance and travel, travel, travel.
Greta scrolls through my Instagram feed. She’s angry. “Name a single celebrity who’s standing up for the climate! Name a single celebrity who is prepared to sacrifice the luxury of flying around the world!”
I was a part of the problem myself. Only recently I had been posting sundrenched selfies from Japan. One “Good morning from Tokyo” and tens of thousands of “likes” rolled in to my brandnew iPhone. Something started to ache inside of me. Something I’d previously called travel anxiety or fear of flying but which was now taking on another, clearer form. On 6 March 2016 I flew home from a concert in Vienna, and not long after that I decided to stay on the ground for good.
A few months later we walked home from the airport shuttle having met Svante and Beata off a flight from Rome.“You just released 2.7 tonnes of CO2,” Greta says to Svante. “And that corresponds to the annual emissions of five people in Senegal.” “I hear what you’re saying,” Svante says, nodding. “I’ll try to stay on the ground from now on, too.”
Greta started planning her school strike over the summer of 2018. Svante has promised to take her to a building supplier’s to buy a scrap piece of wood that she can paint white and make a sign out of. “School Strike for the Climate”, it will say. And although more than anything we want her to drop the whole idea of going on strike from school – we support her. Because we see that she feels good as she draws up her plans – better than she has felt in many years. Better than ever before, in fact.
On the morning of 20 August 2018, Greta gets up an hour earlier than on a regular school day. She has her breakfast. Fills a backpack with schoolbooks, a lunchbox, utensils, a water bottle, a cushion and an extra sweater. She has printed out 100 flyers with facts and source references about the climate and sustainability crisis.
She walks her white bicycle out of the garage and rolls off to parliament. Svante cycles a few metres behind her, with her home-made sign under his right arm The weather is rather lovely. The sun is rising behind the old town and there is little chance of rain. The cycle paths and pavements are filled with people on their way to work and school.
Outside the prime minister’s office, Greta stops and gets off her bicycle. Svante helps her take a picture before they lock the bicycles. Then she nods an almost invisible goodbye to Dad and, with the sign in her arms, staggers around the corner towards the government block where she stops and leans the sign against the greyish-red granite wall. Sets out her flyers. Settles down.
She asks a passerby to take another picture with her phone and posts both pictures on social media. After a few minutes the first sharing on Twitter starts. The political scientist Staffan Lindberg retweets her post. Then come another two retweets. And a few more. The meteorologist Pär Holmgren. The
singer-songwriter Stefan Sundström. After that, it accelerates. She has fewer than 20 followers on Instagram and not many more on Twitter. But that’s already changing.
Now there is no way back. A documentary film crew shows up. Svante calls and tells her that the newspaper Dagens ETC has been in touch with him and are on their way. Right after that [another daily newspaper] Aftonbladet shows up and Greta is surprised that everything is moving so fast. Happy and surprised. She wasn’t expecting this.
Ivan and Fanny from Greenpeace show up and ask Greta if everything is OK. “Can we help with anything?” they ask. “Do you have a police permit?” Ivan asks. She doesn’t. She didn’t think a permit would be needed. But evidently it is. “I can help you,” Ivan says.
Greenpeace is far from alone in offering its support. Everyone wants to do their utmost to help out. But Greta doesn’t need any help. She manages all by herself. She is interviewed by one newspaper after the next. The simple fact that she is talking to strangers without feeling unwell is an unexpected joy for us parents. Everything else is a bonus.
The first haters start to attack, and Greta is openly mocked on social media. She is mocked by anonymous troll accounts, by rightwing extremists. And she is mocked by members of parliament. But that’s no surprise.
Svante stops by to make sure that everything is OK. He does this a couple of times every day. Greta stands by the wall and there are a dozen people around her. She looks stressed. The journalist from [newspaper] Dagens Nyheter asks whether it’s OK if they film an interview, and Svante sees out of the corner of his eye that something is wrong. “Wait, let me check,” he says, and takes Greta behind a pillar under the arch. Her whole body is tense. She is breathing heavily, and Svante says that there’s nothing to worry about. “Let’s go home now,” he says. “OK?” Greta shakes her head. She’s crying.
“You don’t need to do any of this. Let’s forget about this and get out of here.” But Greta doesn’t want to go home. She stands perfectly still for a few seconds. Breathes. Then she walks around in a little circle and somehow pushes away all that panic and fear that she has been carrying inside her for as long as she can remember. After that she stops, and stares straight ahead. Her breathing is still agitated and tears are running down her cheeks. “No,” she says. “I’m doing this.”
We monitor how Greta is feeling as closely as we can. But we can’t see any signs that she’s feeling anything but good. She sets the alarm clock for 6.15am and she’s happy when she gets out of bed. She’s happy as she cycles off to parliament, and she’s happy when she comes home in the afternoon. During the afternoons she catches up on schoolwork and checks social media. She goes to bed on time, falls asleep right away and sleeps peacefully the whole night long. Eating, on the other hand, is not going well.
“There are too many people and I don’t have time. Everyone wants to talk all the time.”
“You have to eat,” Svante says. Greta doesn’t say anything. Food is a sensitive topic. The most difficult one. But on the third day something else happens. Ivan from Greenpeace stops by again. He’s holding a white plastic bag. “Are you hungry, Greta? It’s noodles. Thai,” he says. “Vegan. Would you like some?”
He holds out the bag and Greta leans forward and reaches for the food container. She opens the lid and smells it a few times. Then she takes a little bite. And another. No one reacts to what’s happening. Why would they? Why would it be remarkable for a child to be sitting with a bunch of people eating vegan pad thai? Greta keeps eating. Not just a few bites but almost the whole serving.
Greta’s energy is exploding. There doesn’t seem to be any outer limit, and even if we try to hold her back she just keeps going. By herself.
Beata sits with Greta one day in front of parliament. But this is Greta’s thing. Not hers. The sudden fuss over her big sister is not easy to handle. Beata sees that Greta suddenly has 10,000 followers on Instagram, and we all think that’s crazy. But Beata handles it well. Even when her own feed is filled with comments about Greta, and can you tell her this and that. All everyone suddenly cares about is Greta, Greta and Greta. “It’s nuts,” Beata says one afternoon after school. “It’s exactly like Beyoncé and Jay-Z,” she states, with an acerbic emphasis. “Greta is Beyoncé. And I’m Jay-Z.”
We get death threats on social media, excrement through the letter box, and social services report that they have received a great number of complaints against us as Greta’s parents. But at the same time they state in the letter that they “do NOT intend to take any action”. We think of the capital letters as a little love note from an anonymous official. And it warms us.
More and more people are keeping Greta company in front of parliament. Children, adults, teachers, retirees. One day an entire class of elementary-school pupils stops and wants to talk, and Greta has to walk away for a bit. Feels mild panic. She steps aside and starts crying. She can’t help it. But after a while she calms herself down and goes back and greets the children. Afterwards she explains that she has a hard time associating with children sometimes because she has had such bad experiences. “I’ve never met a group of children that hasn’t been mean to me. And wherever I’ve been I’ve been bullied because I’m different.”
Several times a day people come up and say that they have stopped flying, parked the car or become vegans thanks to her. To be able to influence so many people in such a short time is bewildering in a good way. The phenomenon keeps growing. Faster and faster by the hour. In the run-up to the end of the strike, Greta is being followed by TV crews from the BBC, German ARD and Danish TV2.
Altogether 1,000 children and adults sit with Greta on the last day of the school strike. And media from several different countries report live from Mynttorget Square. She has succeeded.
Some say that she alone has done more for the climate than politicians and the mass media have in years. But Greta doesn’t agree. “Nothing has changed,” she says. “The emissions continue to increase and there is no change in sight.”
At three o’clock Svante comes and picks her up and they walk together over to the bicycles outside Rosenbad. “Are you satisfied?” Svante asks.
“No,” she says, with her gaze fixed on the bridge back towards the old town. “I’m going to continue.”
The next day is Saturday 8 September. It’s the day before the Swedish parliamentary elections and Greta is going to speak at the People’s Climate March in Stockholm. She has only given one speech before at a small event. Prior to that she’d never spoken in front of more people than fit in a classroom, and on those few occasions she had not exactly seemed at ease.
There are a lot of people in the park for the march and the rally. Almost 2,000 have crowded together at the stage and more are on their way. Somehow there’s a different feeling about this protest. It doesn’t feel the same as usual. It feels as if something might happen. Soon. It’s no longer just the familiar faces. The regulars. The activists. The Greenpeace volunteers in polar-bear suits. Here, suddenly, are all conceivable kinds of people and characters. People who might have all sorts of jobs. “This is my first demonstration,” states a well-dressed man in his 40s. “Mine too,” a woman next to him says, with a laugh.
The host introduces Greta and she walks slowly but steadily into the middle of the stage. The audience cheers. Svante, on the other hand, is scared out of his wits. What will happen now? Will she start crying? Is she going to run away? He feels like an awful parent for not putting his foot down and saying “No” from the start. All this is starting to feel too big and unreal.
But Greta is as calm as can be. She takes the speech out of her pocket and looks out over the sea of people. Then she grasps the microphone and starts speaking. “Hi, my name is Greta,” she says in Swedish. “I am going to speak in
English now. And I want you to take out your phones and film what I’m saying. Then you can post it on your social media.”
“My name is Greta Thunberg and I am 15 years old. And I have schoolstriked for the climate for the last three weeks. Yesterday was the last day. But…” She pauses. “We will go on with the school strike. Every Friday, as from now, we will sit outside the Swedish parliament until Sweden is in line with the Paris agreement.” The crowd cheers.
Greta continues. “I urge all of you to do the same. Sit outside your parliament or local government, wherever you are, until your country is on a safe pathway to a below-two-degree warming target. Time is much shorter than we think. Failure means disaster.”
Her voice is steady and there are no signs of nervousness. She appears to be at ease up there. She even smiles sometimes.
“The changes required are enormous and we must all contribute in every part of our everyday life. Especially us in the rich countries, where no nation is doing nearly enough.”
The audience stands up. Shouting, applauding. The ovation doesn’t stop. And Greta is smiling the most beautiful smile I have ever seen her smile. I’m watching everything from a live stream on my phone in the hallway outside the dressing rooms at the Oscarsteatern. The tears keep coming.
•This is an edited extract from
Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisisby Malena and Beata Ernman, Greta and Svante Thunberg, published by Penguin on 5 March (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
She devotes the whole Christmas break to telling us about unspeakably awful incidents
profound.
Goodman was born on the farm. Growing up, local towns would have their own grocery stores, a drugstore, car dealers, machine dealers, says Goodman. “Our little town down the road, had a movie theater, lumber yard. You know, they were all doing well.”
As those farms have gone so have the businesses. School districts don’t have enough children to stay open. “Now you can drive through any small town and if they don’t have a good share of their main street boarded up, they’re doing really well.”
The economics are tough. Milk prices have come back recently to about $17.55 per hundredweight in February 2020, but that is still way down from around $25 in 2014. Prices are expected to rise but in the meantime global forces have battered farmers. Feed prices rose as ethanol production took more crops, China bought more soy and tariffs increased equipment prices. For too many small farmers even as prices recover from a long slump, the cost of producing milk exceeds the prices they can sell it for.
“There was a period in 2013 when China panicked and started to buy every drop of milk on the planet,” says Peter Vitaliano, chief economist at the National Milk Producers Federation. “We had milk prices that dairy farmers would tell their children about.”
The buying spree followed the melamine crisis when Chinese producers had been adulterating milk, baby formula and other foods with melamine, a chemical that is toxic in large quantities, to increase their apparent protein content.
US milk producers started oversupplying milk. Smaller farms like those in Wisconsin produce more of their own feed than the huge players so for a while they were at an advantage. But when China got its milk industry back on track and feed prices came down, the advantage vanished and the collapse started in earnest. “It was particularly brutal on the smaller operations,” says Vitaliano. “That pressure is, unfortunately, likely to continue.”
Goodman made the shift to organic in 2014 and for a while it worked. Organic fits his values; the back of the car outside his home carries an old Occupy “We Are the 99%” sticker and one for Elizabeth Warren. But organic prices collapsed as vast industrial-style dairies in Texas and other warm states with 10,000 or more cows flooded the market with cheap milk. Competing with confinement dairies – “concentrated animal feeding operations” as they are curdlingly known – was impossible.
The huge farms were shipping organic milk from Texas into Wisconsin for a lower price than Goodman was getting paid. “You know, you can’t compete with that,” he says.
As prices collapsed a planned sale fell through. He sold the land and then the cows. “I guess for me, that may have been harder than actually selling land because here you tend to be pretty attached to your cattle.”
Each cow in his 50-strong herd had a name. Lara was his favorite. “When I would come in, she would always just turn around and kind of look at me, looking for someone to scratch her head,” he says. “It seemed like whenever she saw you, she just had to stop and look at you like she sort of was making that connection that you’re OK.”
In Elkhorn, some 130 miles south of Wonewoc, Dave Kyle is hopeful he has found a solution. Kyle, a youthful, trim 60-year-old with hands that look like they could snap a girder, raises brown cows, not the black and white Holsteins that are the most popular breed of dairy cattle in the US. His 150-strong herd produces “A2 milk” that mostly lacks a form of DŽ-casein protein called A1 that proponents argue is easier for people with milk intolerance to digest.
He and his wife Laurie also run Perkup, a cosy cafe in Elkhorn, where you can get an A2 latte – but no nut milks.
Unusually in a rapidly ageing industry Kyle also has an heir. Hayden Kyle, 26, works with his dad and aims to one day take over the farm - in an industry where the average age of a farmer is 58, that is a big advantage.
Hayden Kyle wasn’t interested in farming when he was younger. After college he worked at a department store for a year then told his dad: “I think I want to farm.”
It’s not a popular choice among his peers. “There were 250 kids in my high school class and maybe one other kid is farming,” says Hayden Kyle.
For those less fortunate, life can look bleak. “I know of some farmers that have committed suicide,” says Kyle. “They were third or fourth generation and now the farm ends with them and they feel that terrible burden of, you know, it was on my watch that this fell apart,” he says. “I could see where it gets very overwhelming.”
Farm Aid, the farmers’ support group, started a crisis line during the farming crisis of the 1980s. Goodman says people at Farm Aid have told him the level of calls is now higher than back then. He says farmers should know that the forces ranged against them are beyond their control.
“You can’t just categorically say, well, it was my fault, I did something wrong, because you didn’t. You just happen to get caught up in a system that’s not working.”
• In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
Mike can restart his campaign after the worst debate performance in the history of Presidential Debates,” Trump said in a tweet. “Congratulations Bernie, & don’t let them take it away from you!”
Addressing supporters in Texas,
Sanders on Saturday night was buoyant about his prospects in the state.
“Don’t tell anybody, I don’t want to make them nervous,” Sanders said sarcastically, “but we’re going to win the Democratic primary in Texas.”
If what happens in Vegas happens in California and Texas, Sanders may be hard to catch.