Ingmar Bergman's daughter, Linn Ullmann: ‘I am not a traumatised person'

Telegraph

11-05-2025

At the offices of her publisher in Oslo, Linn Ullmann is grumbling about the ­recent trend for 'trauma literature'. It's strange, says Ullmann – the 58-year-old daughter of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann – that we seem to have reached a point where 'the only thing that matters about a book is what happened to [the author]. It's turning us all into Victorian virgins and dangerous bogeymen. And that's a very uninteresting way to talk about gender and sexuality.'
Ullmann, who is a respected author and journalist in her native Norway, is referring to the kind of book she was determined her ­latest, a lightly novelised memoir called Girl, 1983, would not be. ­Slipping between the first and third person, Girl, 1983 is a splintered, elliptical account of the week ­Ullmann spent in Paris as a 16-year-old girl at the invitation of a 'strung out... in demand, unpredictable' fashion photographer she had met in a lift in New York, and to whom she refers only as K.
K had idly promised to introduce her to some of the most prestigious modelling agencies in Paris; when she gets there, in her new blue coat and red bobble hat, she finds herself in the company of other girls, drugs, and several shadowy, threatening men. On her first night in the French capital, she gets lost after a party and, unable to recall the name of her hotel, winds up at K's flat at two in the morning.
And yet the book is less about that night – which involves sex, and afterwards, the girl wrapping ­her­self in white towels on the bathroom floor, having just vomited – than about the difficulty of forming an account, so many decades later, of what really happened. ­Ullmann (who previously touched on the episode in Unquiet, her 2015 auto­biographical novel about her father) remains unsure of the extent to which she can trust her memories. 'The girl unravels,' she writes, 'whenever I draw near.'
When she first came up against her inability to write about what happened in Paris with any absolute certainty, Ullmann was, she tells me 'so angry with myself! I thought, 'If you are going to write about it, you should remember more.' But once I realised it was OK to write about forgetting, it was no longer a problem.'
A former literary critic and something of a public intellectual in ­Norway, where she lives with her second husband, the writer Niels Dahl, Ullmann peppers our conversation with literary references. These, too, frame her perspective on the events of Girl, 1983, which has shifted over time.
'In a strange way, it followed my experience of reading The Lover, which I've read several times throughout my life,' she says, referring to Marguerite Duras's 1984 novel. 'When I read it in my 30s, I thought it was about a ­sensual affair. When I read it again recently, I thought, for the first time, 'My God! This is about a destructive sexual relationship between a 15-year-old girl and a much older adult!'
To a modern reader, Girl, 1983 is unquestionably about a coercive relationship – K is cruel and controlling – though Ullmann takes care to give the girl her own power. Meanwhile, in the background, an ugly male figure hovers: Z, who many years later will be accused by several women of sexual assault and rape while running a model agency in Paris during the 1980s. Ullmann is quick to point out that she never had anything to do with Z – 'I only found out what had happened after I had nearly finished the book,' she tells me – and refuses either to confirm or deny his identity.
Her wariness is partly ethical, but she's also uneasy about her book being packaged as a tidy story of victim and predator. 'My object was not to tell a victim story,' she says. 'I was much more interested – and still am – in the girl. I used myself. I was interested in her desire and her rage. And part of the delight of writing the book was giving her agency. When she sits up at night and he's sleeping, naked, and she compares a part of his anatomy to a snail without a shell – that was fun to write, because it's giving her agency. I'm not sure if that was mine at 16, but now I can give it to her.' She was keen, too, to capture the complexity and contradictions of adolescent longing. 'I wanted to evoke that feeling of being young and being so incredibly full of desire, and wanting him with every fibre of her body – and then the desire goes – and the shame of that.'
This brings us to the MeToo movement and the impact it has had on the way we talk about sexual relationships between powerful men and younger women. Ullmann is careful to frame such conversations as a complicated topic that's ill-served by oversimplification. 'There can be assault, but the woman can also feel desire, and this is a conversation that also needs to be had. I wanted to write about those ambiguities.'
She goes on: 'Toxic masculinity is a horrible expression. It's being misused. There are toxic women and toxic men, but I don't think it's toxic masculinity when a man opens a door for me or disagrees with something I've said. It's a word that's lazily applied, like 'trauma'. That's a very serious thing. I've never experienced it – I'm not a traumatised person. But some ­people have three traumas a day... I didn't write a trauma novel and I can't stand it when a 29-year-old says, 'I'm so traumatised because...''
Ullmann looks frustrated. 'It's a very lazy way of thinking. Because of course there's assault. But stupid or rude behaviour isn't necessarily assault.'
Ullmann doesn't like speaking much about her parents in interviews beyond what she is prepared to put down in her books. Her mother appeared in 10 of Bergman's films in the 1960s, before the couple split amicably in 1970. Ullmann was brought up by her mother, mostly in America, but she would spend each summer with her father at his holiday home on the island of Fårö, off Sweden's southeastern coast. She and Bergman had planned Unquiet together as a book about getting old, but illness consumed Bergman before they could write it, and it ultimately became Ullmann's homage to him. Like Girl, 1983, it is concerned with the fallibility of memory. 'When we finally sat down with the tape recorder so that I could record him, he already was in the borderland between imagination and fiction and dream,' she says. 'He was the genre I ended up writing in.'
She's interested, too, in the ethics of writing about family members. Her mother is a strong presence in Girl, 1983: initially, she refuses to let her daughter travel to Paris, but later agrees, reluctantly. Liv Ullmann is now 86. In the book, part of which is set over lockdown, we see her contact her daughter from her then home in Massachusetts via fax, which is apparently her preferred means of communication.
'My mother and father are public people and I've been in their stuff, so they can be in my stuff,' says Ullmann, both of whose parents wrote books about their lives. 'My mother would always say the female characters she played in [Bergman's] films were versions of him. She has also said that she wished I had ­portrayed her a little differently [in Girl, 1983], but she knows, she's smart. She's still the most beautiful woman in the world. I'm still a little bit in love with my mother.' Does she think that her mother, during her many years working in the film industry, might have had experiences similar to those her daughter was exposed to in Paris? 'Oh, absolutely,' she says, but refrains from offering further details.
She's similarly circumspect about her father, saying only that 'both my parents were raw, wild storytellers. They had that in common. Growing up around people so immersed in storytelling – and in film particularly – was an education in the power dynamic between the seer and the seen.' And so when she wrote Girl, 1983, Ullmann was keen to restore 'the gaze' as much as she possibly could to the girl. 'I don't think K remembers me... and that is a great freedom,' she says. 'He owned this story back then. I own it now.'