Linda Boström Knausgård is sitting at a corner table in a London cafe a few days before lockdown. Slender, pale and serious in a high-necked cream blouse, she looks like a character in an Ibsen play. This is apt in more ways than one, for as hundreds of thousands of readers know from the books written by her ex-husband, Boström’s life has been as full of dark, domestic and psychological drama as any of her fellow Scandinavian’s heroines. But the Swedish poet and author is here to tell me that she is through with being a character in someone else’s novels. “I am finding my own language and it feels good. I feel free,” she says.
The ex-husband in question is Karl Ove Knausgård, the Norwegian writer whose six-part series of autobiographical novels, My Struggle, became a worldwide literary sensation over the past decade. As well as documenting his own daily life in minute detail – from the kind of cigarettes he smokes to the grim alcoholic death of his father – the books laid bare Boström’s lowest and most intimate moments. When we meet, I feel I already know more about her than I do about some of my closest friends.
I know about her attempted suicide in her 20s and that she is bipolar, like her father. I know about her struggles with the illness that led to the breakdown described by Knausgård in the final book in his series. I even know about their squabbles over shopping and childcare and that she is terrible at housework. “She always wanted something else, never did anything to improve things, just moaned, moaned, moaned,” Knausgård wrote, provoking one reviewer to wonder: “What kind of person would publish such a thing about his wife?”
At the time, although some of his wider family cut him off completely, Boström stood by Knausgård and defended his freedom to write whatever he wished. How does she feel now, three years on from their divorce?
“I have made my peace with the books now but in reality I was so angry about what he wrote,” she says. “As a writer, I respect his right to use his own life as material and, objectively, I thought the books were very good. But on a personal level I was really angry about the way he looked at me. His view of me was so limited, he saw only what he wanted to see. It was as if he didn’t know me at all. Reading it felt like suffering a loss. Now I just wonder if maybe he’s one of these male writers that can’t really write about women.”
As a teenager in the 1980s, Boström dreamed of becoming an actress like her mother, Ingrid Boström, who was a celebrated name in Swedish theatre at the time. She was devastated when she failed to get into acting school but then discovered she had won a place at a leading writing school instead. “It felt like my destiny,” she says.
She was already making her name as an author when she first met Knausgård in 1999 at a writers’ workshop. Boström went on to publish some short stories and a novel, The Helios Disaster, during the early part of their marriage. But four children and her illness – plus the storm of attention and controversy that raged around Knausgård – stalled her career.
Now she has written two novels in quick succession: Welcome to America, the sparse, shocking story of a young girl who refuses to speak, loosely based on her own childhood, which was awarded Sweden’s prestigious August prize, and the more openly autobiographical October Child. Among much else, the latter book, published last autumn in Sweden, gives her take on events towards the end of the marriage to Knausgård.
Does it feel good to be able to put her own spin on things for a change? For instance, Knausgård wrote that the couple agreed to separate; in October Child, Boström says it was his decision. “Settling scores was not really my intention. What I set out to do was write a good book. I wasn’t interested in giving my point of view on what Karl Ove wrote about,” she says. “I found myself one day just writing the first 20 pages and as I wrote I found this very raw language of my own, this sort of dark humour, and also this horror. But it wasn’t supposed to be a diary of the end of our marriage.”
Much of October Child is set in the psychiatric institution Boström entered after her breakdown, where she stayed on and off for the next four years. It describes the brutal electric shock therapy that she underwent as her marriage was ending. At that point, she had become ill enough that the decision to undergo this “horrific” treatment was forced upon her. She has described it since as a form of abuse. “The doctors told me it would be OK, that it was like rebooting a computer,” she says. “But they didn’t really know. They didn’t have the language to describe it.” Boström believes she has lost many of her memories as a result. “Some have returned but by no means all. Writing the book helped with that, though,” she says.
Boström first discovered she was bipolar at 26, after a troubled childhood overshadowed by her father’s condition. He was an alcoholic as well as bipolar and his behaviour was unpredictable. For much of the time growing up, she remembers feeling she should be very quiet.
“My mother divorced my father when I was very young, so she was all I had,” she says. “I felt I needed to look after her and be as little problem as possible so she would stay around. I felt like I could never speak my mind – I had to keep quiet.”
There were few boundaries as to when her father could visit Boström and her brother. Often, he would turn up in the evenings, while her mother was at the theatre. “When he was doing well, he could be lovely,” she says. “But he was a potent threat when he wasn’t. I found him very frightening during those times.” In Welcome to America, Ellen’s father forces her to sit in one place all night, listening to him sing a favourite song, until she wets herself. “That happened in real life,” Boström says.
As a consequence, most of her childhood evenings were spent watching her mother rehearse or perform at the theatre. “That was the safest spot. Nothing could happen there. I knew if he came into the theatre he would be stopped. At home, he could climb up the drainpipe and break in, which he often did. My mother never called the police or social services. She didn’t want anyone outside the family to be involved,” Boström says.
How did she feel when she was diagnosed with the same illness that had afflicted her father? “I felt horror, complete and utter horror,” she says. “Because I knew what was in store for me. When you are up you don’t sleep. Ideas come to you very fast and you want to do all these strange things you don’t normally do. You walk in the city all day and all night. I would think I was making new friends everywhere and some of them weren’t nice at all. Manic people can seem very charming. If you met me when I was up, you would probably think I was in a good place. It feels like a good place at the time but you know from experience that it’s not. And that you’re going to crash down. It is a life sentence I live with.”
For now, however, life is good for Boström, or as good as it can be in the time of Covid-19. Both her books have been much praised in Sweden and October Child will be published here and in the US next spring. She moved to London at the start of this year to be near her children, aged six to 16, who live in the city with their father and his new partner, a publishing executive. Boström’s new home is a house in a leafy suburb near the Thames.
What does she hope for from the move? “Let’s see what happens,” she says. “It’s a fresh start. Most of all I would like to be seen as a person and an author in my own right. For such a long time, when people saw me they would think, oh yeah, Karl Ove, and, oh yeah, bipolar. I’d like that to change.”
• Welcome to America by Linda Boström Knausgård is published by World Editions (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
