- (Read Danish version here.)
Some books stay inside you for many years. Some of them are never written. Maybe because others push their way to the front. Or because you outgrow them. Or simply because you don’t dare to write them.
The book was working on had been inside me for many years. I didn’t have the courage to write it. I thought I had to—I had to move into a different form of writing. But I didn’t dare.
Ethical Dilemma: What Can You Allow Yourself to Write?
What held me back was the feeling that I needed to take others into consideration. This is a novel about people, real people. It is directly based on something I experienced a few years ago. And what I write will inevitably affect the people I write about.
I thought I had to respect the boundary of how close one may approach the reality of memory, the limit of how much one can write about real people—especially when it’s deeply personal. Can writing about someone harm them, and if so, is it a form of violence?
Drawing from the Source
It’s fair to say that it’s perfectly normal for authors to use themselves, their experiences, and the people around them in their writing. They draw inspiration from what they’ve seen and lived, from the proverbial source. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is famously inspired by his experiences in Italy during World War I and his affair with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky.
Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks is said to be about his own family. This can inject energy and authenticity into novels. In most cases, the autobiographical material is entirely transformed into a fictionalized universe, into a narrative. Reality is coated in the sugar of fiction.
Reality Without Fiction’s Sugarcoat
But what if you go further? When you approach documentary realism. When it becomes a significant narrative device to get closer to reality—not to write journalism or autobiography, but to linguistically recreate the past as accurately as possible. To give the events an artistic interpretation but without sugarcoating them, without creating unnecessary distance. To work with the language of documentary and fiction, blending the two.
I wrote other books in the meantime, tried to forget the one inside me. I thought it would never come to be, that I wouldn’t dare, anyway.
Help from Norway
But recently, I found help from Norway. Not least from Karl Ove Knausgård, who writes relentlessly about his memories and his time—taking the blows that come with it. But even more, it was an interview with author Tomas Espedal that gave me the courage to dive into a “docuprosa” writing style. Espedal said:
If you feel like you have to be nice and considerate towards your readers, then you are FINISHED as a writer!
The ambiguity between autobiography and prose opens up some new, uncomfortable possibilities for literature. It is this uncertainty we must exploit, and for which we, if we cross boundaries, must pay in the form of guilt, bad conscience, and loneliness. You might even get sued.
Moving Away from Playing at Literature
When I read that, I felt hit. It was exactly what I wanted—to write in the field between biography and prose because I believe that something new and more genuine can emerge there, at least for myself as a writer. Tomas Espedal continues:
We must move away from staging things, away from playing at literature. We must go deeper. We must enter an almost documentary space. I think it is absolutely crucial to be hard and strict enough to establish a new form of documentary realism.
My First Ruthless Attempt
I began writing the book this spring. The form is still uncertain; I still doubt the structure and the language. But it’s an entirely new way of working for me, one with a different drive. Unlike my earlier books, this time, I don’t feel like I’m creating something but rather remembering something vivid and clear, something joyful and painful—a kind of real-life panorama that I must shape into words.
I try to do it without thinking about taking others into consideration. It’s hard. I still think about how many will feel I’m crossing the line—the readers, perhaps, the real-life individuals involved, certainly. But mostly, myself. I think: Fuck, can I really expose these sides of myself?
Perhaps that’s the most important part: to be ruthless with yourself?
