The Writer Who Embraces Forgetting

The Atlantic

3 days ago

When it comes to memoirs, an author's task is clear: Remember how it happened; then, tell the truth. Writers who draw on personal stories are often dogged by nonfiction's prevailing imperative of factual precision. They should want, above all, to get it right.
But what if one has forgotten it, even if that thing feels important enough to write about? Whatever the reason for a memory's erasure—the blitheness of youth, the defense mechanism of blocking out pain, the natural erosion of particulars over time—it often throbs like a phantom limb, no less potent for the absence of details. Faces and words may fade, but their emotional residue frequently lingers.
A diligent storyteller might curse these gaps as hopeless obstructions, but the Norwegian author Linn Ullmann has reconceived them as central to her work. 'How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences?' asks the narrator of Girl, 1983, Ullmann's latest novel, now translated into English by Martin Aitken. The book seeks to answer this query by recasting personal writing as a conversation between recollection and amnesia. For the protagonist of Girl, 1983, this relationship is intensified by competing desires: to recover the lost shards of a painful adolescent memory, or to let them fade into oblivion.
Ullmann's protagonist seeks to record a past experience that she struggles to fully remember, but the autobiographical elements she does provide tend to align with Ullmann's own history. These varied tensions between fiction and fact ripple throughout the book in vivid recollections drawn from Ullmann's life, broad smears of vanished history, and interludes depicting the uneasy work of remembering. A reader might get the sense that Ullmann has removed the top of her head in order to reveal the choreography of her mind. And yet, Ullmann calls this introspective book a novel, imposing some distance between herself and the story she's told. She challenges the idea that memoir is more intimate than fiction, and manipulates genre to express a vulnerable relationship to her own cerebral archive: what she can claim to know, what she can't bear to face, what she has lost.
It is fitting, for these reasons, that Girl, 1983 —the title of which reads like an aptly cryptic caption—begins with a missing object. Ullmann opens the book by describing a lost photograph, one taken of the unnamed narrator when she was 16, 'which no longer exists and which no one apart from me remembers.' Forty years later, when the narrator has a 16-year-old daughter of her own, and finds herself unmoored by depression during a COVID-19 lockdown, she decides to write about the picture and the circumstances surrounding it. Her choice is fraught because, by the narrator's own admission, 'the story about the photograph makes me sick, it's a shitty story.' She has 'abandoned it a thousand and one different times for a thousand and one different reasons.'
The narrator thinks back to October 1982, when, while riding the elevator in her mother's New York City apartment, she catches the eye of a 44-year-old photographer, 'K,' who invites her to come to Paris for a modeling gig. She readily accepts, despite her mother's protests. Soon after she arrives, she begins a sexual relationship with K. She is thrilled to model for this older man, and ultimately poses for him once, before telling him she wants to go home. He derides her as a 'crybaby' and a 'neurotic little bitch' whom he regrets meeting.
Here the paragraph breaks, and once more, the protagonist claims forgetfulness. 'I don't remember one day from another,' she narrates. 'I don't remember how many days I was there, in Paris, in January 1983, perhaps five or seven.' Her complicated desire for K—erotic in nature, and yet based in a childlike longing for approval—produces an irrecuperable psychic fissure. She is repelled by his aging, 'decrepit' body and embarrassed by her own 'greedy body saying yes' to his sexual maneuvers. Nonetheless, their affair continues in New York City, though it is short-lived and ends abruptly; the photograph he takes of her runs in a 1983 issue of a now-defunct French fashion magazine. For safekeeping, the narrator slips a copy of the picture inside a white notebook, but when she searches for it decades later, both the photo and the notebook are gone. To tell the photograph's story, she must summon the details from memory as best she can.
Those familiar with Ullmann's biography might immediately suspect that she is the girl in the photo; after all, her own upbringing echoes the one depicted here. Ullmann is the daughter of the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and the Norwegian actor Liv Ullmann, and specifics of her childhood are not difficult to locate. Moreover, it is her own teenaged face that peers from behind the typescript on the book's cover, looming above the words 'A Novel.' You might find this interplay between word and image destabilizing. Perhaps Ullmann sought in fiction the creative and emotional freedom to portray both her atypical childhood and her parents in more impressionistic terms, or perhaps she hoped that classifying the book as a novel would offer some measure of privacy to her family and herself.
Then again, Ullmann is in well-traveled territory. Autobiographical novels and works that otherwise test the boundaries between novel and memoir—Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? —are familiar to contemporary readers. Literature has a distinct ability to illuminate truth's multiplicities; writers like Ullmann remind readers that fact and fiction are fragile categories, and that collapsing them can yield enthralling results. Girl, 1983 is still more deft in its experiments, subverting conventional ideas about fiction's use of the truth. A reader might expect autobiographical fiction to flesh out the skeleton of a memory with invented details. Ullmann instead draws on the category of the novel to embrace the gaps, to insist on their primacy in any remembered history. Ullmann has not just written an autobiographical novel; she has suggested that every autobiography might be a novel in the first place.
If Ullmann had labeled Girl, 1983 a memoir, few readers would have raised an eyebrow, because she barely disguises her story's basis in autobiography. The protagonist is undoubtedly her proxy: Like Ullmann, she is a writer in her 50s, half Norwegian and half Swedish, with an actress mother who was 'one of the most beautiful women in the world' and an illustrious father who was largely absent from her upbringing. And like Ullmann, the protagonist has already written a novel that was 'based on real events.' Unquiet, translated into English by Thilo Reinhard in 2019, chronicles Ullmann's parental relationships—particularly with Bergman—with seeming fidelity.
For Ullmann, designating her latest work a novel seems to communicate something both distinctly personal and universally true. By foregrounding incomplete memories—she writes about trying to ascertain 'the order of events, the ones I remembered and the ones I'd forgotten and which I had to imagine'—Ullmann lays bare the reality that minds are not so much storage devices as sieves. As her protagonist puts it, 'Forgetfulness is greater than memory.' To call Girl, 1983 a novel, rather than a memoir, is no mere exercise in literary classification, nor is it only a challenge to the limits of genre. It is surrender, inscribed: an acknowledgement that ownership of one's memories is provisional, an unstable cache susceptible to time and circumstance.
Ullmann's protagonist wrestles with this difficulty. Over the course of the novel, she struggles to recount the Parisian photo shoot and her affair with K. The history is 'made up mostly of forgetting, just as the body is composed mostly of water,' she explains. The story, separated into three sections—Blue, Red, and White—travels a spiraled, associative, and fragmented path, making persistent returns to the events connected to the photograph. Most notably, it frequently revisits the protagonist's past and present relationship with her often-distracted mother. Indeed, the narrator's desire for proximity to her mother forms the connective tissue stitching together the chronology of her childhood. 'I've never been much good at distinguishing between what happened and what may have happened,' she reflects. 'The contours are blurred, and Mamma's face is a big white cloud over it all.' Perhaps recollection always requires a degree of fiction-making, not simply because people are inherently forgetful but because memories are shaped as much by impression and sensibility—a mother's face, the hazy sketch of a dark Parisian street—as they are by actual events.
And yet, as Ullmann makes clear, remembering and forgetting are not so much actions as forces that everyone must negotiate. One might try to foster conditions for remembrance—take photographs, keep a journal, stash relics—but forgetfulness sets its own obscure terms. This need not be distressing. In fact, there is something pleasurable in setting down the burdens of the past. 'I don't want to lose the ability to lose things,' the narrator protests, in response to a promotional email for an app that makes it easier to retrieve misplaced items. Too much past accumulates; it gnaws like a parasite, thriving on the vitality of one's most punishing memories. What a relief, to let some things fade away.