Linda Boström Knausgård

Ellen, an eleven-year old girl stops speaking during to a family crisis. Her older brother is holed up in his room (as some teens do), her father is dead, her mother—an actress by trade—acts as if all is normal. Ellen goes silent but speaks from behind her silence to the reader.

While I had difficulty accepting that the language of this narrative, not quite stream-of-consciousness, came from an 11-year old girl (13 or so seems more realistic) I nonetheless enjoyed this short book of one young girl’s psychological response to trauma. The prose is captivating in some places, lyrical in others. Can't rave about it, but it's an interesting, short read.… (más)

October Child was a curious and creative form of a memoir, or was it a curious form of a novel? Different reviewers and the book’s publisher disagree, but what difference does a label make? Knausgård is very straightforward in writing about her mental health problems, as well as her relationship, and finally her divorce from fellow author, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Characterizing the beginning of their relationship as a time when “We were drunk on love and alcohol our whole first summer together.” Several sections of the book are written almost as one side of a conversation she’s having with Karl. “My illness dragged us all down,” and “I knew that what I’d done had raised a wall in you. You will never stop blaming me for this. Never forgive me.”

Between 2013 and 2017 she was in a psychiatric ward off and on, and underwent eighteen electroconvulsive therapies. I wasn’t aware that Sweden uses the most electroconvulsive therapy per capita of any country, and some believe that it’s “the answer to a person’s every torment.” She refers to the institution she was in as the “factory,” and her detailed descriptions of the electrical procedure—with all the beds of patients lined up and waiting for it—quickly brought to my mind some bizarre sort of a shocking assembly line. She writes of the euphoria that follow the treatments and how some think it’s a result of some brain damage done. She also gives her readers a very curious look at the effects of the procedure on one of a writer’s most valuable and unique resource, their own memories. “Nobody cared that I wouldn’t be able to remember large swathes of time afterwards.”

How we see ourselves and the world around us is tied directly to our past memories. Through much of the book, Knausgård is in a massive struggle with her tangled present. At different times, she’s writing and trying to make sense of what’s going on in her life through writing, a process of recording and interpreting friends, her family, medical professionals, fellow patients, and even herself. “I didn’t have an unhappy childhood. Neither was it a happy one. It was no one’s childhood. I didn’t know who I wanted to be and this made me weak.”

As a book groupie, I am always interested in the dynamics of writers who are married and working out of the same household. She and Karl already had three kids, when she found out that she was pregnant again. By that time, she was already suicidal, having been saving up a lethal dose of her medications for many months, and she still decided to go ahead with her attempt to end it all. Obviously, she wasn’t successful, and thankfully the baby was born just fine. Attempting suicide while pregnant is a brutal level of desperation. Of her mindset, she says, “But the truth was, death and dying were all I thought of.”

Knausgård lays out her life with such openness that I had to keep reminding myself that this was factual and not some wild bit of fiction. The Wall Street Journal characterized her writing with the following. “Her sentences are short, dry, and brittle, like tinder on the verge of combustion.” As she grapples to maintain her memories and her connection to sanity, bits and pieces of all parts of her life play out in her mind’s eye. I found myself feeling her detachment, isolation, and depression full on. When she writes about her feelings, she is so close and personal that I sometimes had a desire to step back and away from its intensity. Yet, she writes, “Some parts of the novel were really heavy to write, but sometimes I found myself laughing while I was writing. I think the book needs that dark humor—things can be hysterically funny at a psychiatric ward.”

She begins the book with, “I wish I could tell you all about the factory, but I can’t anymore. This is what I know: I was there for several long stretches … and my brain was shot through with so much electricity that they were sure I wouldn’t be able to write this.” The following section was very near the book’s end and referred to herself in that psychiatric ward. “When a door opened at the far end of the corridor. It was me. I was the one coming out of the room with Maria and closing the door behind me. I was walking through the corridor. As I passed by, I looked at myself like you might look at a thing in passing, gaze unfixed. I watched myself leave the ward.”

I found this book a fascinating inside look at what losing your mind and trying to find it again looks and feels like.… (más)