In my hometown in Sweden, my friends and I used to stage plays at a small theater. I still recall the glare of the spotlights and the hush of the audience. More than anything, I recall the whisper that would come from the prompter’s box when I forgot my lines. I thought of it then as divine intervention. Part of me still does.
I went on to study literature at the University of Lund, Sweden, later at the University of California at Davis. During the eighties, while living in San Francisco, I covered the local art beat for Art & Auction in New York. Those were heady times. New galleries were opening, new money was mixing with old, and new collections were being assembled. In many ways it was the contemporary version of Artful Players, my book about art in early San Francisco – just as wildly irreverent and almost as much fun.
By the time I wrote Fylgia, my first novel, I was living with my husband on the coast north of San Francisco. The idea for Fylgia came to me as a single scene. A family crosses a snowy field to a country churchyard in Sweden. A man lowers a small white coffin into the frozen ground. Beside him, a woman clenches her fists. A man in black, a wreath around his arm, watches from the pasture below. Only after the others leave does he approach the grave. That was all I knew, but I was off.
Now back in San Francisco, I’m working on a new novel. The setting is a manor house in southern Sweden, much like the ones I used to visit when I was a student in Lund. Again, the idea came to me as a single scene. Men and women wait in a mirrored room. Curtains stir in the breeze, rose petals lie scattered on white tablecloths, someone plays a Beethoven sonata on a grand piano. The whole room is full of gestures and hidden meanings: here, a roving gaze, there a subtle turning away. And so the creation of Rilke Summer began, the novel that’s now nearing completion. It has haunted me ever since.
Perhaps that’s what stories do. They won’t leave you alone.