Nilo, Nadja, Vedge…
My three children. I have little leisure time left!
Loud names.
Stay with Vedge: he’ll be a famous singer, you’ll know about him.
What lessons does he instill in them?
Be nice.
That’s all?
Kindness and compassion. What is more valuable than being compassionate?
What is that about?
Put yourself in the shoes of the other and walk two kilometers. Understand his motives.
Very useful for novel.
It is for me. I don’t know for others. Understanding what happens to a third party and giving them a voice… Being a nurse I have learned that.
My admiration, madam nurse.
It is beautiful to help patients in a psychiatric center.
What have you learned?
To understand everyone! Because everything has more than one face. Not to judge. I deal with real people.
The girl with a 39 degree fever that opens her novel, is she real?
The fever is real. The girl is me. And the fever is very literary, without exceeding 39 degrees.
Why very literary?
Open your mind to madness, expand it to a reality without precise limits, exotic…
How does literature come into your life?
My father was a journalist and my mother was a teacher: there were books at home. And I read and played soccer.
To football?
For girls to play kicking the ball is very common in the Nordic countries.
Could he become a footballer?
He preferred to comment on the books that we shared and read with a group of friends.
What book stimulated you as a young girl?
To start reading, Hemingway is highly recommended for any young person, due to its simplicity and narrative effectiveness.
What novel has marked you the most?
Paul Auster’s Palace of the Moon is important to me because of its high emotional precision and lightness. In New York I look at the window of that apartment for a long time…
Fetish?
Yes, literary tourism: I practice it. I suggest myself and see a shadow in that window.
Scenarios from fiction or memory?
It’s all fiction, after all. If something is well told, it is because it is well fictionalized and true at the same time.
True or real?
The really real is closer to boring than the fabulously true.
Do we have to force ourselves to fiction?
In the books, of course. But outside are my patients, who are very real and far from healthy.
Mental health, says Oliver Sacks, is knowing how to relate to yourself.
Everyone who writes is written, is counted: I count myself as a twenty-something in Stockholm in the nineties.
How were the nineties in Stockholm?
Last station of the analog before entering the digital. If you made an appointment with a friend and he didn’t show up, then you couldn’t send him notices or calls to his mobile.
A more charming world then and much more practical today.
Today there is no way to hide, they always find you.
Do you miss that Stockholm?
I miss that feeling of freedom, the iron curtain had fallen and the world was opening up and fluffing up, it seemed to all of us that there would be no more wars, that global happiness was imposed…
Is that ideal over?
I am optimistic, today in Stockholm everything is more open, modern, European, relaxed, easier for the queer, for example…
Now comes the but?
For young people it was easier to find jobs in the nineties than today, which costs them much more to maintain themselves.
What else has changed?
Before, people only got drunk on weekends, and now alcohol is consumed during the week as well.
Have you changed a lot?
I was so naive then… Today I see that there is war and climate change… And it seems unusual to me to have been so candid.
Have you had remarkable teachers?
Anyone is if you stop to talk and listen carefully. That’s where the magic comes from: it happened to me a few days ago in line at an Indian food restaurant.
And all of this will end up on a page… Choose one from your book.
More than a page, a sentence, the one that closes the novel: one character says it to another during a visit together to the cemetery…
What does it tell you?
“Soon it will be too late. That is why we must strive to squeeze life to the fullest.â€
