Lydia Sandgren

Image Credit: Emelie Asplund

Hello! As your book has just been published in translation in the UK for the first time, I wanted to ask you what the experience has been like?  

Well, it is like reliving the experience of having it published in Sweden, which happened exactly three years ago, just when the pandemic broke loose. But everything was very chaotic when it came out in Sweden and the whole country shut down; all release parties and interviews were just cancelled. So, this is like doing that all over again, but without the lockdown, so it feels wonderful to have the chance to do it all over again!

I had never been in the public eye when Collected Works came out in Sweden; I was not known to anybody, and I had never published anything. So, these three years have been very overwhelming for me, since I had to learn the public part of being an author, not only the private part, that I know very well from writing Collected Works, which took me ten years. I was all alone during this time, so I had this feeling of suddenly being catapulted into public life. It was very successful in Sweden – the book became an immediate success, everybody read it, and it had very good reviews. So, it was a big thing really, for me.

That’s always so fascinating to hear about because, from our point of view, the book is completely new! I was wondering, did you have any worries about certain cultural sensibilities and whether they would translate into English? Or do you think it’s a universal novel? 

Well, both. I was wondering about translation in general, and whether people in another country would feel interested in something going on in Gothenburg in the 80s and 90s; I felt it was a very local story. And as you probably know, Gothenburg is the second largest city in Sweden – it’s an old worker’s city and an industrial city, as opposed to Stockholm, which is where all the culture happens. So, Gothenburg always had this inferiority complex against Stockholm. Stockholm is a wonderful city with so much to offer – Gothenburg, not so much. I love the city and I live here, and I will live here for the rest of my life, but it’s not the same thing.

We’ve had a very good musical scene in Gothenburg – some very good rock music comes from here, but it’s never been a city of literature. And of course, there are writers from Gothenburg, but the city itself hasn’t really been depicted in a great novel before, not the way that there are so many wonderful books about Stockholm. I felt when I started writing it that I really wanted to write a Gothenburgian story, not only placing it in this city and letting it take place here, but also, I wanted the city to come alive in the novel. And apparently I succeeded because the response from Gothenburg has been huge, and people are very happy about having a novel set in their city. But I was always wondering if that kind of thing would work in translation and how foreign readers would approach what is, for me, a very local story.

Definitely, but I think that idea works in your advantage in a way, because sometimes when you’re from a certain place, you have your own biases about it, whereas if you’re reading a book about a place you know nothing about, you approach it without any preconceptions.

Yes, I think foreign readers read it with fresh eyes, much more than in Sweden, where – Sweden is such a small country, and everybody knows each other – it’s impossible to read it without having a relation to Stockholm. Everybody in Sweden has a relation to Stockholm.

What was that experience like of reading your work in English for the first time? 

It was quite eerie but also uplifting to read, and I could recognise myself in it, but it was also like being filmed and seeing yourself in a video and you’re on candid camera – you think, ‘That’s me, but when did this happen?’. It was a strange experience, but she’s done a wonderful job.

For readers who haven’t read Collected Works, could you summarise the novel and maybe just talk a bit about the writing process?

Well, that’s the hardest question. The book is about a middle-aged man, Martin, who runs a small, independent publishing house in Gothenburg, and his wife, Cecilia, who has been missing for 15 years; she just left the family, and nobody knows why. The story centres around Martin and Cecilia and their friend Gustav, who becomes a very successful painter. The book operates in two different times: on the one hand, we have Martin and Cecilia and Gustav when they’re young and growing up, and then we also meet Rakel, the daughter of Martin and Cecilia, when she’s grown up and is starting to try to understand what really happened to her mother. Why did she leave and what really happened around her disappearance? So that’s basically the centre of the novel: Rakel’s searching for her mother, and the coming-of-age story of Martin and Cecilia and Gustav.

I started to write this book when I was about 20. I’ve been writing stories and novellas and songs all my life, so I felt like it was about time I write that novel. How hard can it be? I came from this punk rock tradition, where you just got a guitar, learnt a couple of chords, plugged in the amplifier and you fired away. So, I imagined it was about the same thing to write a novel. Turned out, I was wrong.

When I started, I knew that I wanted to focus on the disappearance of a mother, and I also knew that I wanted to write about a middle-aged man looking back on his life, finding that it was not really what he expected it to be. And so that was my starting point. I also had this idea that I wanted to have two different time levels, the past and the present, and I wanted them to interact. I worked quite a lot during the years on how to build the story around the time frame, and after about three or four years, I found out that I had to do research because I was writing about a time when I wasn’t even born, and it was harder than I’d imagined. I remember writing the chapter when Martin and Cecilia have just met, and they are hungover, so Martin is taking care of her. And I was thinking, what did people do when they were hung over in 1984? Today, we watch Netflix, but they have no Netflix, they didn’t even have internet or a computer. So, it was like a rabbit hole writing about these kinds of things. I had to dive into it and try to explore this unknown world.

I think I imagined the writing process to be somewhat linear - you start at the beginning, and you work your way through it and then finally you reach the end. But it turned out to be like sediment after sediment. I think I’ve rewritten it dozens of times, and it grew organically rather than in a linear way.

Did you always have a sense of the scale and the depth you were looking for? Or did that also happen organically? 

I think I had a sense of it from the beginning, but I didn’t know the depth of the depth. It’s like, you see the ocean and think, “Oh, it’s such a pretty ocean. I see the water. I see the surface. It’s a big ocean.” But when I really plunged into it, I found out that a) it’s not very easy to swim, and b) it’s really, really deep.

Before I get more into your characterisation and plot, I wanted to ask which writers you were inspired by? Personally, your book reminded me of Donna Tartt – who I love – and she also took 10 years to write each of her novels!

Once a week, I’m googling ‘Donna Tartt new novel’…

Me too! It should be time for the next one - it’s been ten years! I really felt that you have similar levels of depth, and the characterisation of intense relationships and friendships that are followed over time.

That makes me very happy to hear because I love Donna Tartt and she has been an influence for me. I have had some other reading experiences that really made an impact on me, and one of them was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I read it when it first came out in Sweden – I think it was published in the UK in maybe 2000 or 2001, and it came out in Sweden very quickly after, so I must have been 16 or 17 years old. And I understood that she was a very young author, and it made such an impact on me, both the novel itself, and the fact that such a young person had written it.

She treated her story with such a confidence – she clearly wasn’t afraid. There was a curiosity in her way of approaching her characters and the story, a curiosity, and a confidence, which really struck me. I felt like I wanted to approach literature that way. And at about the same time, I read Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates. I’ve read it several times and it was also a deeply moving experience. It was like somebody opened a door and showed me this fantastic world. I don’t write like Joyce Carol Oates, but she had that confidence, and you can feel the love of writing and the love of a good story and the love of language in her work.

I think one of the most overwhelming things I felt when reading Collected Works was that it is just such a good story! I felt like it’d been quite a long time since I had just read a good story in the truest sense of the word, as a lot of books I’ve read recently are maybe more focused on style…

I think the story in contemporary literature, like the story itself, has been not so important. Or the atmosphere and the language and style has been in focus, but this feeling of ‘you really want to know what happens’ – I personally love that in a book.

I do too. Moving on to your characters, I wanted to ask you about how you approached witing a book in which two of the most prominent character are men. You’ve said you were a little bit nervous about it, but could you tell me more about that experience?

When I first started writing, I figured that writing Rakel would be the easiest part because we were the same age, we had both studied Psychology, and we went to the same places. But I found out that writing her was so much more complicated; I did not feel free. There was something that felt heavy, holding me back. And I found that when I wrote young Martin, I could hide myself in him, and it was really fun. I had all these ideas, and there was a sense of being free.  

At the beginning, I felt self-conscious about being a young woman writing about a man, but I thought, well, if I focus on the similarities, the things that are the same for all of us, like being in love, having a best friend, it’s pretty much the same thing… And as he grows older, I felt like I had gotten to know him; he became less of a stranger and more of a companion.  

Also, I’ve been listening to rock music since I was a child, and I’ve read so many books by male authors; around 80% of all culture I have interacted with is made by men. So, the perspective of a middle-aged man was pretty well known to me. I also felt that, if they can write about a young woman, why shouldn’t I be able to write about a man? How hard can it be? So, I became rather cocky and thought ‘Why shouldn’t I?’.

I like what you said about thinking about what’s common between us, because sometimes I think that can get lost in some conversations.

Yes, the similarities are always much bigger than the differences, I think. there’s always some common ground where you can meet and understand another person.

I wanted to talk about Gustav, who is Martin’s childhood friend who ends up becoming an incredibly successful artist. While he’s obviously a unique character, I felt like he belonged in a cannon of other flawed, almost childish characters who have a good heart and a lot of external success, but a number of destructive vices, and I wondered if there were any other characters or people who inspired you in writing Gustav?

I think I’ve been thinking about my characters in terms of responsibility, and their ability to take responsibility for one another. I thought about Gustav as devoting himself exclusively to art, and his ultimate loyalty being to art and painting. And I haven’t really thought about this until now, but being an artist requires some kind of ruthlessness, and an ability to be absolutely ruthless with other people; shutting them out, not having them in your mind, and focusing only on the work of art that you are creating. And I think I have a little bit of that. I think every artist needs to have at least a fragment of that ruthlessness. And in Gustav, I could let it grow and float out and explore that kind of approach to life and relationships. There’s a constant conflict between everyday life and the business of creating, and Gustav is on the one extreme point on the scale.

I think in one review, one of the British newspapers called Gustav a kind of Peter Pan character, which I think is a good description because he, Gustav, could never have a child – he would be a total catastrophe of a parent. And I think that, essentially, Collected Works is a story about growing up, the process from childhood to adolescence and then adulthood. Gustav is stuck in the middle; he doesn’t want responsibility. He’s not only uncapable of taking it, but he also doesn’t want to do it. I remember when I wrote the book that it was important for me that when Martin and Cecilia have a child and they start their young family life, Gustav leaves Gothenburg. He goes to Stockholm and then London, and he never really comes back to Gothenburg, and that was important to me. He doesn’t want to be a part of this family life.

Do you find yourself blaming Gustav for the certain things that he does? 

As a writer, it’s not my job to blame or to give a moral thumbs up to anybody. I don’t think that’s my mission. So, I wouldn’t say I blame him. I think it’s a part of who he is, it’s just his inner logic. And that goes for all of them; I really wanted them to be morally, psychologically, and logically consistent. And if Gustav had acted any differently, it wouldn’t be him.

Yes, that makes total sense. You mentioned Cecilia, who is the mother whose disappearance is at the centre of the story. But although she has a big role in the plot, she isn’t present in terms of her own voice, so I wanted to ask whether she exists as a fully formed character in your mind? And whether you understand her motivations and her reasons, but just chose not to show them?

Well, this is a very good question; it captures my ambivalence. When I started to write the book, I thought that I needed all the answers and that I would have a complete picture, and my task as a writer was to give a little piece here and a little piece there for the reader to puzzle together. So, I thought I had to know everything, but I was very young, I was 23. I didn’t know very much about life, and I wasn’t so experienced myself. I think a good thing about getting older is that your ideas of life kind of fill out with experience. So, when I started writing the book, I had no chance really of knowing who Cecilia was, and why she did what she did. I found out that, actually, her disappearance was so hard to understand; it was such an enigma. And when I started to treat it as a big question mark in the story – why on earth is it possible for her to leave her family like this? What kind of person does this thing? Who does she need to be in order to be able to do this? When I started writing about something I didn’t know, and started to explore it, rather than providing all the answers, that made it possible for me to write and to be creative about the story. So, I didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle; it was more that I found out while I was writing about her.

I decided early on that I did not want her to have a voice of her own. She’s exclusively depicted by other people, and their memories and stories of her. I wanted her to be this powerful absence in the centre of people’s lives, although they don’t see her very clearly. She’s an idealistic romantic figure for Martin and Gustaf. And Rakel’s big mission is to find out who is the person behind the picture, but maybe when she actually meets Cecilia… I mean, that would be a whole new book. I chose to leave her voice out of this book because I had no chance to write it truthfully. I think now, having children myself, I have a better shot at it actually; maybe in ten years’ time, I’ll have enough experience to write her story.

Yes, you can do a Donna Tartt! This might be a bit of an odd question, but both your book and another book we’re featuring in this issue, Three by Valerie Perrin, focus on a trio of friends and, in both cases, there’s two men and one woman. I wanted to ask you whether you think this makes for fertile ground for literature – the tangled relationships between three people? And why is it such a unique dynamic?

A very good question, and I think we need to go to Freud to answer it. Actually, for several years when I was writing Collected Works, there was only Martin and Cecilia. Gustav didn’t exist until year four or five of writing. I remember it all very clearly; something didn’t work out in the story – it was as though I was building a house and it was all wobbly. And I thought, right, something’s missing. And one day, I just sat down at my desk, and I realised, of course, Martin has a best friend. And I started to write. It was like it had been there all along, in my mind.

I think the trio is so much more powerful than the dyad because it gives place to the ‘other’. There are so many more possibilities of relationships when there are three people: there’s so much more action and depth. Actually, in what Freud calls the Oedipal complex, the small child finds out that there is someone else – it’s not just the child and their mother – and the mother wants something from this other person. In order to grow up and to leave childhood, we have to accept that there’s an outer world and that we can’t be everything to another person. And the people we love will have dealings with other people – they will love other people as well. We are not the entire world for somebody, and they can’t be the entire world for us. That happens when you go from being two to three.

And I think that, in all of our grown-up relationships, even in a marriage or in a close friendship, there’s always the presence of the third – a friend, an ex-boyfriend, an ex-girlfriend, somebody at work. So, the trio is just so much more psychologically powerful and interesting than the dyad.

Yes, and like you said, it gives the characters the chance to reflect on their relationships and bring that to the other person.

Yes, if you are a normal grown-up person, it’s like that. Some people can’t really bear the existence of a third person and they just go to pieces. I think that’s a whole different story.

Do you think that Gustav has a certain element of that?

Yes, I think Gustav has an element of that.

I mentioned earlier that our theme for this issue is Light, and one of the ways we’re approaching this idea is though books that radiate a sense of lightness. And although Collected Works is a very long book, so some readers might immediately assume it’s a heavy book because of its size, but it’s really not. I think this links back to what we talked about earlier about it being a good story that carries the reader through the narrative with a sense of lightness. Stylistically, was that something that you were aware of and were intentional about?

Absolutely. I had two associations when you mentioned light, and the first one was about this; I strived for lightness in style. I read an interview with Donna Tartt on The Goldfinch where she said that, if she’s writing such a long book, she knew she had to make it possible for the readers to, you know, read it. And she mentioned that she wanted to write sentences that you could read at a fast pace, but every sentence would have to be beautiful in itself. I also wanted my story to have a lightness to it in the sense of the reading experience, so I worked a lot on that, and Donna Tartt really guided me in terms of structure and language. And when I was reading and rereading my manuscripts, I always looked out for parts where it slowed down and became heavy and my eyes started to dart all over the paper. I really thought about the reader. I wanted to write so that you didn’t really realise you were reading it.

The other association was light literally. And I thought about Rakel shedding some light into a shadowy room; what she does is bring truth and naked, bare daylight into the shadowy stories of her past. That can be rather brutal, and in broad daylight, things are never as beautiful as they are in your memory and your stories and fantasies.

We have a final question that we ask everyone, which is, do you judge a book by its cover?

Yes, I do. But I’m always happy when I find out I’m wrong.