As a child she was already writing, knowing that one day she would write books. Now, more than thirty years later, the Swedish journalist Johanna Westlund (1978) has finished her debut novel Absence: a gripping story of solitude, mental illness and freedom of choice. We are delighted to introduce this gifted novelist and we talked with her about her debut novel, writing and how dance performances inspire her.
BNA: For the people who don’t know you, could you introduce yourself?
I’m a journalist who covers the publishing industry, and last year I co-founded a new literary magazine back in Gothenburg in Sweden, where I am from. The articles in Magazine Fyrahundrafemtio (which means 450 in Swedish) deal with the way literature and society are connected, something I’m very interested in. Right now I’m planning another media project, which is in the same spirit but will have a completely different outcome! I like to challenge myself, both in my work and in my free time, and I like adventure. I love travelling and seeing new things, reading and learning new things, and learning how to do new things –from writing a novel to surfing.
BNA: You have a lot of experience as a journalist. And you have just finished writing your first novel. Did your journalistic know-how help you write Absence?
Absolutely! Researching the novel was quite easy, since I’ve done a lot of research before. I’m also used to planning and structuring my own work, which was a great help in the enormous task of writing a novel. However, there’s a huge difference between reporting and writing a novel, and even though I’m a journalist I wasn’t prepared for the vastness and complexity of it. Writing a novel is much freer and liberating, but at the same time much more demanding, because the possibilities are endless.
BNA: Could you tell us briefly what the novel is about?
It’s a story about six young students who become friends. They are studying psychology and discovering the world together, but the more important side of this adventure is – of course – what’s going on beneath the surface and what happens to the characters’ psyches: as individuals, as a group, how they interact, and how the dynamics of power and friendship shift. And after a while it turns out that not all these psychology students are mentally suited to being future psychologists… The central character, Andrea, is introverted, scarred by her past, and very insecure. For her, studying at university and meeting these new friends is like coming home and finally starting to live. When she meets someone who has ulterior motives and does not necessarily want what’s best for her, she learns the hard way that not everybody is to be trusted. That forces her to make a difficult decision. But sometimes what looks like a loss can be a gain – and vice versa. It’s a story about loneliness, mental illness and freedom of choice. In a way, it’s also a psychological thriller that takes place inside someone’s head.
BNA: Absence chronicles the life of 21-year old Andrea. Why did you choose to write about a girl of that age?
When you’re 20 you know nothing and everything about life. You’ve just grown up, everything is new and exciting and the possibilities are endless. But it’s also an age where you are easily influenced, especially in all the new situations in which you find yourself. You are vibrant but also vulnerable. You fumble your way along, but you also fumble with great passion. The highs can be very high – but the lows can also be very low, especially for someone as scarred as Andrea. So it turned out to be the perfect age for the themes I wanted to write about.
BNA: There is a deep psychological game between the novel’s characters. Is university a good setting to create the necessary atmosphere and context for that?
I think it’s an excellent setting! The mix of uncertainty, curiosity and the thirst for knowledge and the skills you need to navigate life becomes more obvious in an environment where the aim is to learn as much as possible. University can, in a way, be a world of its own, with rules and expectations. It is a setting where you learn many things, meet new people and evolve. A perfect setting for a story about power and knowledge! I wanted my students to study psychology since I thought it would make a good contrast between what happens to them and what they study – practice versus theory.
BNA: How did the writing process go? What problems did you face?
One of my biggest problems was that I wasn’t sure I would actually be able to write the novel, and tie all the stories of the six characters together. I have done a lot of writing before – short stories, poetry, scripts, and of course piles and piles of articles – but when I tried writing novels before, I always lost interest in my own story or thought it was worthless and threw it away. But I can be very harsh on myself, so this time I decided that I had to be nice for once – to encourage myself and not scrutinize everything till after I’d written the whole story. So, in order to do that I allowed myself to be completely free in my writing – I had a basic storyboard as a foundation, but I wrote one scene here, one scene there, and did not edit much out until I had everything down on paper. This was great fun, but it also meant I had to do a LOT of scrutinizing, judging and editing later on. That was hard! But I think it was good, both for the novel and for me.
BNA: When you started writing Absence, did you already know what the story would be like?
Yes, at least in broad outline. I knew from the beginning exactly what would happen to the two main characters, Andrea and Bernhard, and how they would develop throughout the story, and most of what would happen with the other four characters. But I discovered a lot of things along the way. Everything evolved a lot and, in the end, some of the psychological experiments and theories became more important for the actual story than I expected them to be when I started writing.
BNA: Did you have to do a lot of research?
Well, I didn’t have to do it because everything is based on my imagination – not on a true story or an actual university. But at the same time I wanted to make the story believable. So I terrorized every psychologist and psychology student I knew – or that I met in the two years I was working on the novel, including complete strangers – with questions about their studies and about their feelings about the studies. I also had a lovely “focus group” of psychologists who analysed my characters. And I took a university psychology class myself – but that was not only for research, it was also because I’m genuinely interested in psychology.
BNA: Were you always writing from a young age?
Yes, I’m afraid I am one of the usual suspects who have always loved to read and write. As a child, my favourite class in school was the “story hour” when we got one hour a week to just sit down and write stories. And I also wrote a lot of poetry as a teenager – I still do once in a while. At 25 I made my first big effort to write a novel, but I threw it away after a couple of months when I realized it wasn’t a good story – it was just a way of processing what was going on in my own life (even more so than the teenage poetry, really!). I decided that the next time I tried to write a novel, I would have to have a great story to tell – not just my own life masquerading as a novel.
BNA: Which authors inspire you?
I have many favourites – for example, Joyce Carol Oates and Siri Hustvedt for language and themes, David Sedaris and Claire Castillon for their subtle humour and absurd darkness, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Haruki Murakami for their modern but timeless epic novels. And that’s only a few of the contemporary authors I admire!
But in my own writing, other art forms inspire me even more than the written word. Film and photography always give me a lot of thoughts and ideas, as do live performances, and the best thing is dance – wordless depictions that I just have to put words to in my head. That always gets my mind going! I love sitting there in the dark theatre, watching and thinking, and then quickly scrawling all my thoughts down afterwards before I forget them.
BNA: You seem to be an adventurous type. You climbed Kilimanjaro, you love surfing and have travelled the world. Can we find that adventurous spirit in your novel?
Maybe in the fact that I wrote it at all? It was a bit of an adventure – deciding that “this is it”, that I was going to work hard and do everything I could to finish this novel and make it as good as I could. And maybe you can also detect this spirit in some details in the novel, such as Andrea’s growing courage, Cilla’s travels, and Peter’s restlessness.
BNA: Now the novel is written, are there any new projects readers can look forward to?
Besides my regular journalistic assignments, I am working on a non-fiction book about loneliness, and I’ve also just started writing my next novel. I’ll have to go to a lot of dance performances now!
