Latest news with #LinnUllmann
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Haunted by the Ghost of Her 16-Year-Old Self, a Writer Returns to 1983
GIRL, 1983, by Linn Ullmann; translated by Martin Aitken How do you write about a part of your life you can't remember? For the narrator of the Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann's autofictional novel 'Girl, 1983,' the not-remembering has become so urgent that it demands articulation. In 2019, the unnamed writer is in her mid-50s when a half memory resurfaces to haunt her: In the winter of 1983, when she was 16, she insisted on traveling alone from her mother's home in New York to Paris at the request of a much older, famous photographer. As the memory floods back, the narrator feels like she is floating several inches above the ground while walking the dog; she lies on the bathroom floor, unable to bring herself to shower. She seeks out a psychiatrist, but he is of little use. She tells people she is 'hard at work' on a book about the girl she was in 1983, but this is a lie; she can't find the words. And then, as the ghost of her former self sits beside her, she begins to write through the fog. 'Be accurate. I can't. Be specific. I don't know how,' Ullmann writes. 'Precision is the minimum requirement. Not just for writers and artists, but also for girls who claim they're old enough to travel across the Atlantic by themselves and have their picture taken.' But there is no precision in 'Girl, 1983.' The book is endlessly recursive, as shapeless as water. It pools, eddies, evaporates. A blue coat and a red hat, worn on that trip to Paris, reappear and reappear and reappear. Little else ever comes into focus. The narrative flips vertiginously between past and present, mimicking the movements of a mind circling trauma, repeating itself, reaching the threshold of a memory then darting away. The line breaks and white spaces threaten to overtake the type. The older woman's present timeline is as vague as the past she tries to grasp. Dialogue exists only in fragments, scene hardly at all. The reader is often lost, with no authorial hand to steady us. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In ‘Girl, 1983,' a writer tries to make sense of her teenage self
One September morning as she walked through the park near her home in Oslo, the novelist Linn Ullmann saw a ghost. She glimpsed a figure standing under an elm tree, the girl she once was, a wayward 16-year-old who defied her mother to fly to Paris and meet up with a famous, and predatory, fashion photographer.
Atlantic
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Writer Who Embraces Forgetting
When it comes to memoirs, an author's task is clear: Remember how it happened; then, tell the truth. Writers who draw on personal stories are often dogged by nonfiction's prevailing imperative of factual precision. They should want, above all, to get it right. But what if one has forgotten it, even if that thing feels important enough to write about? Whatever the reason for a memory's erasure—the blitheness of youth, the defense mechanism of blocking out pain, the natural erosion of particulars over time—it often throbs like a phantom limb, no less potent for the absence of details. Faces and words may fade, but their emotional residue frequently lingers. A diligent storyteller might curse these gaps as hopeless obstructions, but the Norwegian author Linn Ullmann has reconceived them as central to her work. 'How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences?' asks the narrator of Girl, 1983, Ullmann's latest novel, now translated into English by Martin Aitken. The book seeks to answer this query by recasting personal writing as a conversation between recollection and amnesia. For the protagonist of Girl, 1983, this relationship is intensified by competing desires: to recover the lost shards of a painful adolescent memory, or to let them fade into oblivion. Ullmann's protagonist seeks to record a past experience that she struggles to fully remember, but the autobiographical elements she does provide tend to align with Ullmann's own history. These varied tensions between fiction and fact ripple throughout the book in vivid recollections drawn from Ullmann's life, broad smears of vanished history, and interludes depicting the uneasy work of remembering. A reader might get the sense that Ullmann has removed the top of her head in order to reveal the choreography of her mind. And yet, Ullmann calls this introspective book a novel, imposing some distance between herself and the story she's told. She challenges the idea that memoir is more intimate than fiction, and manipulates genre to express a vulnerable relationship to her own cerebral archive: what she can claim to know, what she can't bear to face, what she has lost. It is fitting, for these reasons, that Girl, 1983 —the title of which reads like an aptly cryptic caption—begins with a missing object. Ullmann opens the book by describing a lost photograph, one taken of the unnamed narrator when she was 16, 'which no longer exists and which no one apart from me remembers.' Forty years later, when the narrator has a 16-year-old daughter of her own, and finds herself unmoored by depression during a COVID-19 lockdown, she decides to write about the picture and the circumstances surrounding it. Her choice is fraught because, by the narrator's own admission, 'the story about the photograph makes me sick, it's a shitty story.' She has 'abandoned it a thousand and one different times for a thousand and one different reasons.' The narrator thinks back to October 1982, when, while riding the elevator in her mother's New York City apartment, she catches the eye of a 44-year-old photographer, 'K,' who invites her to come to Paris for a modeling gig. She readily accepts, despite her mother's protests. Soon after she arrives, she begins a sexual relationship with K. She is thrilled to model for this older man, and ultimately poses for him once, before telling him she wants to go home. He derides her as a 'crybaby' and a 'neurotic little bitch' whom he regrets meeting. Here the paragraph breaks, and once more, the protagonist claims forgetfulness. 'I don't remember one day from another,' she narrates. 'I don't remember how many days I was there, in Paris, in January 1983, perhaps five or seven.' Her complicated desire for K—erotic in nature, and yet based in a childlike longing for approval—produces an irrecuperable psychic fissure. She is repelled by his aging, 'decrepit' body and embarrassed by her own 'greedy body saying yes' to his sexual maneuvers. Nonetheless, their affair continues in New York City, though it is short-lived and ends abruptly; the photograph he takes of her runs in a 1983 issue of a now-defunct French fashion magazine. For safekeeping, the narrator slips a copy of the picture inside a white notebook, but when she searches for it decades later, both the photo and the notebook are gone. To tell the photograph's story, she must summon the details from memory as best she can. Those familiar with Ullmann's biography might immediately suspect that she is the girl in the photo; after all, her own upbringing echoes the one depicted here. Ullmann is the daughter of the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and the Norwegian actor Liv Ullmann, and specifics of her childhood are not difficult to locate. Moreover, it is her own teenaged face that peers from behind the typescript on the book's cover, looming above the words 'A Novel.' You might find this interplay between word and image destabilizing. Perhaps Ullmann sought in fiction the creative and emotional freedom to portray both her atypical childhood and her parents in more impressionistic terms, or perhaps she hoped that classifying the book as a novel would offer some measure of privacy to her family and herself. Then again, Ullmann is in well-traveled territory. Autobiographical novels and works that otherwise test the boundaries between novel and memoir—Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? —are familiar to contemporary readers. Literature has a distinct ability to illuminate truth's multiplicities; writers like Ullmann remind readers that fact and fiction are fragile categories, and that collapsing them can yield enthralling results. Girl, 1983 is still more deft in its experiments, subverting conventional ideas about fiction's use of the truth. A reader might expect autobiographical fiction to flesh out the skeleton of a memory with invented details. Ullmann instead draws on the category of the novel to embrace the gaps, to insist on their primacy in any remembered history. Ullmann has not just written an autobiographical novel; she has suggested that every autobiography might be a novel in the first place. If Ullmann had labeled Girl, 1983 a memoir, few readers would have raised an eyebrow, because she barely disguises her story's basis in autobiography. The protagonist is undoubtedly her proxy: Like Ullmann, she is a writer in her 50s, half Norwegian and half Swedish, with an actress mother who was 'one of the most beautiful women in the world' and an illustrious father who was largely absent from her upbringing. And like Ullmann, the protagonist has already written a novel that was 'based on real events.' Unquiet, translated into English by Thilo Reinhard in 2019, chronicles Ullmann's parental relationships—particularly with Bergman—with seeming fidelity. For Ullmann, designating her latest work a novel seems to communicate something both distinctly personal and universally true. By foregrounding incomplete memories—she writes about trying to ascertain 'the order of events, the ones I remembered and the ones I'd forgotten and which I had to imagine'—Ullmann lays bare the reality that minds are not so much storage devices as sieves. As her protagonist puts it, 'Forgetfulness is greater than memory.' To call Girl, 1983 a novel, rather than a memoir, is no mere exercise in literary classification, nor is it only a challenge to the limits of genre. It is surrender, inscribed: an acknowledgement that ownership of one's memories is provisional, an unstable cache susceptible to time and circumstance. Ullmann's protagonist wrestles with this difficulty. Over the course of the novel, she struggles to recount the Parisian photo shoot and her affair with K. The history is 'made up mostly of forgetting, just as the body is composed mostly of water,' she explains. The story, separated into three sections—Blue, Red, and White—travels a spiraled, associative, and fragmented path, making persistent returns to the events connected to the photograph. Most notably, it frequently revisits the protagonist's past and present relationship with her often-distracted mother. Indeed, the narrator's desire for proximity to her mother forms the connective tissue stitching together the chronology of her childhood. 'I've never been much good at distinguishing between what happened and what may have happened,' she reflects. 'The contours are blurred, and Mamma's face is a big white cloud over it all.' Perhaps recollection always requires a degree of fiction-making, not simply because people are inherently forgetful but because memories are shaped as much by impression and sensibility—a mother's face, the hazy sketch of a dark Parisian street—as they are by actual events. And yet, as Ullmann makes clear, remembering and forgetting are not so much actions as forces that everyone must negotiate. One might try to foster conditions for remembrance—take photographs, keep a journal, stash relics—but forgetfulness sets its own obscure terms. This need not be distressing. In fact, there is something pleasurable in setting down the burdens of the past. 'I don't want to lose the ability to lose things,' the narrator protests, in response to a promotional email for an app that makes it easier to retrieve misplaced items. Too much past accumulates; it gnaws like a parasite, thriving on the vitality of one's most punishing memories. What a relief, to let some things fade away.
Daily Mail
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Dive into the best literary fiction out now; GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann, THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann, ALLEGRO PASTEL by Leif Randt
Girl, 1983 is available now from the Mail Bookshop GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann (Hamish Hamilton £18.99, 272pp) LINN Ullmann comes from impressive stock: she's the daughter of Liv Ullmann and the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, and she wrote beautifully about both in her 2015 memoir Unquiet. She writes more directly about herself in this novelised work of memory, which pivots on an encounter between a 16-year-old girl (a barely disguised Ullmann) and a much older photographer in Paris in 1983. Sex took place, but Ullmann picks at the event like an angry sore, with her inability to remember precisely what happened as much the book's subject as the event itself. A startling, restless, discomforting piece of work that carefully teases apart rigid ideas about experience and truth, predator and victim. THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus £22, 352pp) THE Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, acclaimed for Westfront 1918 (1930) and The Threepenny Opera (1931) has fallen from popular memory, but Daniel Kehlmann mines fascinating territory in this fictionalised biographical portrait of a communist-leaning artist, who found himself cosying up to the Nazis in order to keep his career afloat during the Second World War. Quite how Pabst regarded the propaganda films he produced is a floating question in this hallucinatory novel, which features walk-on parts for Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks (and a brilliantly chilling, loosely disguised Goebbels) alongside fictionalised aspects of Pabst's life (including a floundering, excruciatingly awful period in Hollywood). Throughout, Kehlmann sustains a pervading sickly sense of reality sliding perilously close to nightmare, which is quite possibly how the very private, principled Pabst came to regard his own life. ALLEGRO PASTEL by Leif Randt (Granta Magazine Editions £12.99, 320pp) 'JEROME didn't want to schedule too much during the day. He had noticed with relief very early on in their relationship that, like him, Tanja felt the strong need to regularly withdraw silently to her laptop.' I chose this quote by opening the book at random, but it sums up pretty well both the style and content of this lauded German novel about the relationship between a Berlin-based writer and a website designer living the painstakingly curated lives of your standard globalised millennial. The toneless deadpan sentences take on a strange comic energy as Randt details the relentless self-absorption of two people who paradoxically appear to have no meaningful inner life at all. Its tough to read, like being forced to stare for hours at an achingly po-faced, self-aware and extended Instagram post – no wonder it's being called a novel to capture the voice of a generation.
Telegraph
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Ingmar Bergman's daughter, Linn Ullmann: ‘I am not a traumatised person'
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.'
