It’s Like Drawing a Map: An Interview with Lydia Sandgren

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When we talk about art that moves us, often we mean to tears. Rarely do we ever mean this in the sense of literal geography. This spring, I’d planned for a stint in London followed by a few days in Oslo. Reading Lydia Sandgren’s Collected Works, a runaway debut hit in Sweden (it sold over 100,000 copies in its first year) that catapulted the author into literary stardom overnight, I was compelled to take a last minute detour to Gothenburg to see where Sandgren’s novel occurs.

Collected Works follows the Berg family 15 years after Cecilia’s mysterious disappearance, leaving behind Martin and their children Rakel and Elis. Gustav, Martin’s best friend and a famous painter, has a forthcoming retrospective of his work in which Cecilia’s likeness features prominently. Cecilia, a renowned translator and academic in her own right, looms large throughout the novel, both in the timeline charting Martin’s adolescence and young adulthood as well as in the present during which Rakel begins to search for her mother.

Early in the novel, Rakel reminisces about an exchange with Cecilia a couple years before she left. “‘All kinds of things,’ Cecilia had said, squatting next to her daughter to help her put on her rain coat, ‘become warped and distorted in translation.’ Texts underwent imperceptible corruption. Readers had to keep a sharp lookout, apply critical thinking, and always, when possible, choose the original over the translation.” This purist advice has its place in the book and certainly has its fair share of proponents in contemporary translation theory, but the actual English translation of Sandgren’s work serves as a foil to Cecilia’s warning in its pages. Through the thoughtful coaxing of translator Agnes Broomé emerges Sandgren’s voice: strong, pensive, singing with vitality.

My visit to Gothenburg happened to coincide with Studenten and the National Day of Sweden. If you’ve seen the movie Another Round, the sight of mostly blonde teenagers in white sailor hats and being chauffeured on flatbed trucks may be familiar to you. Broken champagne bottles and discarded cans of snus littered the ground while the square in front of the Gothenburg Museum of Art was covered in blue and yellow confetti. I was disappointed to find out the museum would be closed on both days I was there, preventing me from visiting the site of Gustav’s retrospective. What I did see instead was this: Tai Shanghai, the restaurant where Martin and Gustav often commiserate; the lily pond where Rakel meets with her uncle Emmanuel early in the novel; Kastellgatan 11, Cecilia’s apartment. It was the Gothenburg of everyday life, which Sandgren renders with the grace and care of someone who understands how precious life really is.

During our conversation over Zoom in early September, Sandgren urged me to listen to “Jungleland”, the 9-minute closer on Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run. Along with being a practicing psychologist, Sandgren is also a pianist, citing the E Street’s Roy Bittan as a source of inspiration. “And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all / They just stand back and let it all be,” the Boss belts over Bittan’s thumping chords. In Gothenburg, Sandgren is far from the poets of Springsteen’s America. She has crafted a triumph about what we owe art and ultimately what we owe each other. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Alexa Margorian: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you had this idea [for Collected Works] when you were 20, thinking about a mother leaving her family. Where did that idea come from?

Lydia Sandgren: That’s a good question because I really don’t know, myself. I was too young to understand anything about motherhood. For example, I have a kid now who is two years old, so I was 35 when he came, and I’m also the oldest of seven siblings. I grew up in a family with two parents, both of them very much present, so I did not have this experience myself, neither from growing up nor from being a mother wanting to leave, even if only in a symbolic way. For some reason that is enigmatic and mysterious for me, I was moved by this idea. It touched me and I don’t really know why. I must say, I cherish this mystery that you can get really attached to some idea and you want to know, and find out, and you don’t really know what’s so appealing with it—but you have to go there.

I did not know why she left. It started with a mystery for me. I didn’t have the solution. I just had this idea: a mother is leaving her family and she never comes back. Why is that? What happened? I had to start writing in order to find out. Writing the book was unraveling the story. For me, I did not have it made up from the beginning, but I had to find out. Maybe I thought later I had to write it in order to become a mother myself. There’s some kind of idea that motherhood and writing or intellectual work are impossible to combine. For some, in some way, it’s impossible for Cecilia in the novel. Now that I’ve tried it, I can tell you that it is not impossible, it is doable. 

AM: There are women writers, like Rachel Cusk, for example—she writes a lot about the conflict between motherhood and writing, especially as a career. It’s interesting to me that those pursuits would be seen as being in conflict with one another because I find that you need a lot of empathy to be a writer and you also need a lot of empathy to be a good mother. One would imagine that these things go really well together.

LS: I completely agree. Writing a book is to be in service—you’re in service of the book. You go to your desk, and you sit down and you write, and you think about what’s happening with these people. Being with my family is basically the same thing. I’m booking and cleaning, and the really hard thing is to get time, a part of the day which is just for you, where nobody can disturb and you’re on your own. Before me and my husband even started to talk about kids, he said, “When you’re on maternity leave, I’ll make sure that you get at least one hour per day, every day, to write.” I’ve been writing an hour a day since he was born, and now more. I think you need to have a life with someone who can assure you that one hour. If you have one hour and you write for that whole hour, suddenly there’s a book or at least part of a book, and when you have part of a book, you can always finish it. These things were very hard for me to imagine when I was young. I had this not really realistic idea that being a mother, you had to give up everything, that you would become another person, that I would no longer have the need for writing and reading. I think that was something that was following me when I was writing the book. 

AM: From the first draft to the finished manuscript, what differences did you see? What did you pare down and take away?

LS: I was working on this book for almost 10 or 11 years, and for the first couple of years I had a really hard time writing long paragraphs, long chapters—all my little scenes were so short, fragments only. I had this document and I just called it ‘Fragments’, and I wrote every little piece that I could come up with: little observations, pieces of dialogue, and small things that didn’t fit together. After three or four years, I had a lot of pages and I just printed it and I cut them. I had all this scrap paper and I was piecing them together by hand to see what fits together. 

I was in my education to be a psychologist, so I started educational therapy. When I started to see my therapist, it was suddenly much easier for me to write these long sentences and paragraphs. This piecing together of fragments was very hard for me in the beginning, but it became easier and easier. I started writing full chapters. For a couple of years I was working with the chapters, piecing them together and finding the rhythm and the disposition of the book. Eventually, I had a full manuscript. 

I wrote the last chapter very early on and the first chapter, but the others…it was nothing chronological, a little bit here, a little bit there. Today, I don’t think it would be possible for me to work that way because it would take so much time. But I really did not know how to write and I had to learn how to write a book. When I made it to a full manuscript, I took a year and half to work through it really thoroughly before I sent it to my publisher. I had not been talking to a publisher before, so it was like playing roulette and you’re betting it all on red: here you go, take it or leave it! I did not have any eyes [on it] when I was writing and I had no idea what would happen. I was working through it a lot of times and I think that was good for me. The contours are pretty much the same, but they were more fully detailed and nuanced in the final draft. I worked through it two more times after it was accepted by a publishing house. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite is my best advice. And let it take time. People are in a hurry. They write a book in two years; I don’t know how they do it. I’m writing my second novel now. I actually started it in 2018, the very first ideas, and started writing it seriously in 2020 after Collected Works came out. I’m on my fourth year and I think it will be published next year. That’s too little time, five years!

AM: I did some math. You sold 100,000 copies in its first printing. Only 10 million people speak Swedish. That’s pretty big. Has the process been different, in terms of having something being private versus something being a little more public?

LS: It’s a huge difference, of course, but I think the fact that it took so much time made it possible for me to not go crazy. If I wrote something in six months and it was a big hit and I was really famous and everybody read it, I think that would have been really destructive for me—or for anyone. From when it was accepted at the publishers to when it was published, it was a year and a half, so I had a long time to get used to the ideas and success. It was a pretty fragile thing for me, not everything at once. When it was released, I could release it as well. It was like, ‘Well, now it’s yours! I’ve done my work. I’m leaving, goodbye! I’m going to write my next book.”

Everybody was in lockdown reading my book and I was working at the psychiatry clinic. We had much to do because we had to find a way to see our patients during the pandemic. We could not not see them because they were really mentally ill, so I had a lot on my mind, professionally. I had pretty little time to think, “Oh, now I’m this big writer.” Also, I fell in love with the man who is now my husband. Our history started just when Collected Works came out. He was one of the first people to read it. We were working at the same place, so we went out to celebrate on publication day—I could not have a release party or anything. So I was also very occupied by being in love with him. When things started to go back to normal after the pandemic, and at work, and I could start to have some time to think, I had already become pretty used to being a writer and being read. Had I been younger, more inexperienced, and if I did not have a job that took a lot of time, I think that would have been much harder to navigate for me. After all, I was 35 and I was spending my days with people with severe personality disorders.

[For] young people who have this big success, I think it must be really hard to take the next step, especially if this is your entire identity, of being a writer, and you’re financially dependent on it as well. It has been very important to me to have clinical work and at the public hospital because my colleagues didn’t care and my patients didn’t care. They didn’t even know about this, they had problems of their own. I have had very much a normal life through all this. 

AM: Do you still practice psychology?

LS: Yes, but now I have a small private clinic. Since we had our kid, it took simply too much to be there. Maybe I’ll go back to working in a public hospital later on, but now I have a few patients of my own. 

AM: Early on, Gustav and Martin are talking, and Gustav complains that he doesn’t know what he “intends to investigate” through his work as a painter, which I think is a very natural question for anybody who’s trying to do any kind of art to have, especially at the beginning of their practice. Is that something that you had to wrestle with?

LS: I had some very clear ideas from the beginning and one of them was that I wanted to write about the relationship between past and present. I also wanted to capture this movement of being young, and then gradually finding out that you are living what you thought was your future, a future becoming present and then past. I had this idea, but it took a long time for me to find out in what form and in what way, with which motifs were most suitable for investigating that. Writing is always this movement about not knowing and finding out and finding your question. I do not understand people who make up their entire plot from the beginning and they have this schedule of what will happen.

It’s like drawing a map, and you start with the middle and gradually becomes bigger, bigger, and suddenly you understand that what you were trying to draw was this. It’s actually a pain in the ass not knowing. You’re in the middle of something for so long. You’re wondering: what am I trying to say? What is this about? Why does this feel important. What makes sense? How does it make sense in relation to this?

AM: It’s interesting that you say that your characters are coming to terms with the fact that their future is the present. Throughout the book, Martin is always thinking, “I’m going to be this great writer. I’m going to be like William Wallace.” He’s got this image of who he wants to be in his head. It took me a while to be like, Oh, this isn’t where he thought he’d be.

LS: From the beginning, I had this idea that he would be a middle-aged mediocre man who failed with his life. In many ways, as you’re pointing out, he is, at least in relation to what he thought he would be and what were his youthful fantasies. On the other hand, he succeeds in a different way, which he did not maybe imagine for himself. He is the one grown up person who stays and takes responsibility and takes care of his kids. He has a moderately successful publishing house. That is hard, not everybody can do that. At the end of the book, he’s talking to Raquel about being in service to literature. He really loves books, and finding out that he will not be a writer himself, but that he can still do a lot for literature. That is maybe his way of being not successful, but a more satisfied person, more satisfied with his life. I don’t think Martin would have been able to become a good writer, or at least not a fiction writer because he really doesn’t want to write. If one does want to write, you write. It’s so easy. You don’t think “maybe I’ll write tomorrow”. I think a lot of people want to be writers because it’s a lovely thing, being a writer. It’s the most wonderful thing you can be, having written something. It’s such a gift every day. It’s hard to believe that I can do this for a living. I really understand that people want to write, but if you want to write, you write. I don’t think that Martin really understands that, but both Cecilia and Gustav [do]. Gustav paints and Cecilia does her intellectual things, and they really want to do it. They have a deep desire to do it. Martin does not really have a deep desire to write. If he did, he would have done it, but he doesn’t understand that. Maybe he understands that at the end of the book when he’s 50. 

Some critic called Martin the only hero of the book, and I think that’s a good way of describing him. The others are these larger than life people, but they are no heroes. They abandon and they disappoint and they fail their families and their friends. Martin stays where his responsibilities are. That I could not understand when I was 22. That was something that I understood later on, almost at the end of the writing process, that he really did something good. I thought he was a failure but actually, he was the hero. 

AM: At the beginning of the book, Martin hasn’t come to terms with the reality of his life, of Cecilia being gone and him not having realized his dreams. By the end it seems like he’s finally like, “I need to live the life that I’ve chosen to live versus what I thought that I wanted years ago.”

I thought that was his development through the book, coming to terms with his life and starting to see what he actually has done, and also see things a little bit more clearly, rather than through the shades of his fantasies. He has this idea of Cecilia, he doesn’t really see her very clearly. Neither does Gustav. They have their own picture of her. Raquel, her mission through the book is to understand who her mother actually was, or is. I remember when I was almost finished with the manuscript I told someone that I think this is a book about a daughter looking for her mother. That’s the main theme in the book and I didn’t realize that when I was writing it. I was wondering whether if I should have a chapter about Cecilia where she could talk for herself. Then I decided not. I just wanted the reader to meet her through the lens of Martin, Gustav, and Raquel, and eventually be able to make up his or her mind. The reader has to make her own story about Cecilia. I do not have the final word on the subject. I’m very gald when people have their own storylines that I did not even think about. A lot of people think that Cecilia and Gustav have a love affair. 

AM: Who thinks this? I thought it was pretty clear that he is gay!

LS: My husband! We were dating and he texted me because he was out with his friends and they were debating: Is Gustav gay? Peter, my husband, said, “No, no, no.” A lot of people who don’t think that Gustav is gay think that he maybe had something with Cecilia, like a man and a woman cannot have a friendship. It’s really funny.

AM: One of the things I really like about the book is that you were able to reveal certain things but not in a way that was really obvious, for example: Gustav is gay. How did you decide to reveal certain things in a way that wasn’t like, “I’m going to spoonfeed my audience”?

LS: I’m really glad you noticed this because I’ve worked a lot with that. I want the reader to feel smart, so they can puzzle it together themselves. I really love that myself; I really hate when I’m being told, “Okay, so this happened.” I remember, for example, I reread The Secret History by Donna Tartt and I had this really clear memory of the twins, Charles and Camilla. They have some kind of incestuous relationship. I remember she had spelled it out clearly for the reader so there were no misunderstandings on the subject. But when I read the book again last year, I saw that she never says that, it’s just something a little here and there, but for the reader it’s completely clear. Everyone know this, but you have to make it for yourself. Donna Tartt, being one of the writers that I feel behind my shoulder looking over saying, “Okay, so you have to make it like this.”

I wanted to have some of the mystery, puzzle quality but with human relationships, and it was really fun. I had a good time giving clues on Gustav’s sexuality. They’re in Paris during the AIDS epidemic and he has a lot of angst about testing himself for HIV. I mean, everybody did, but gay people did more than the heterosexual ones. I always thought of the reader as an accomplice, somewhat. The engineering of telling a story, I like that. It’s a fun part of writing. It’s always better to tell less than more, because people are smart and they can draw their own conclusions. It’s much more compelling to not really know and then have to find out than having it all spelled out for you from the beginning. 

AM: The way you talk about the characters’ intellectual and cultural appetites felt very genuine. They like music and movies and books and paintings and all these different things. Did you have any specific cinematic references?

LS: I once was interviewed for a cinema magazine and the interviewer wanted to talk about cinema in Collected Works. I said, “There is no cinema in Collected Works. I have nothing to say about that. Art, maybe, painting and music and literature, but cinema no.” It was not really a big reference for me, but I love cinema. I think I am a very visual kind of writer. When I’m writing something I always see it like in the movies. Like a scene, something happens with angles. I always know when I’m finding the right scene or motive because I can see it so clearly, then I just have to write what I see. I think that’s what makes the book so easy to read; it’s so visual, you can make it your own very easily. 

Obviously, it’s literary. I love words and I love language. I had so much fun in finding the right words and making a sentence. In the beginning, I was thinking a lot: How does one make a good sentence? What is a good sentence? How do you make one? Where do you put the commas? Where do you put the parentheses? How do you do it? IT takes a lot of time to find a language that can really capture what you’re trying to say. 

I’m a little surprised that nobody has wanted to do a movie or a TV series of Collected Works. There has been some interest but they backed out. I think it’s very cinematic. 

AM: I would have thought that [there would be], especially because you could do so much with the going back and forth [between timelines] and the story unfolds in a way that is pretty chronological. 

LS: Finding actors to play Martin 30 years apart…

AM: Give me two hours. I’ll cast this movie for you. 

LS: Who would you have to play Martin?

AM: I’m so biased but I love Anders Danielsen Lie. I adore him. He works with Joachim Trier a lot. He’s a doctor who acts. He’s one of those actors that as soon as he comes on screen you can see him thinking, not in a way that’s obvious. Martin is someone who is an intellectual, and you want someone who’s able to portray him as not someone who’s thoughtless. 

LS: He’s also ruminating. 

AM: I like him in Bergman Island. He has a very small role. A movie about writers as well!

LS: Maybe someone someday will do a movie. A TV Series would be the absolute best because two, three hours is too little. You need eight, nine hours to make something good about it. We’ll see.

AM: Translation factors so heavily in the novel. I want to ask a few questions about that. Your voice comes through so clearly in the English translation.

LS: It’s a great translation. It’s wonderful. 

AM: What was that process like? Were there any references that you thought your Swedish readers were going to get  that my UK or North American readers would not?

LS: Not when I was writing. It being translated for me—I could not imagine. I could hardly imagine it being published! Swedish readers I could imagine but it being translated was so far away. I’m thinking more about that now and I think I’m glad I did not think too much about it because it makes this much more complicated. It’s been very interesting to be translated because the translators work so differently. Agnes [Broomé] translated it to English. She had a few questions at the end of the process. Some translators have questions and want to discuss things. Most of them do their thing and suddenly it’s finished. 

I met my Estonian translator—I had not had any contact with her during the work—and she said, “Oh, it was so easy to translate because I’m as old as Martin, Gustav, and Cecilia so this is my old time. I was living in Gothenburg in the 80s, so I could just sink into your language.” I don’t know what it’s like but I heard it’s a very good translation. There are many Estonians who speak both Swedish and Estonian because Sweden had a university in Estonia back in the day. For me, it’s a mystery. I’ve never tried to translate something myself more than a few paragraphs from English to Swedish and it was really hard. I felt very un-free, like I could not move, like having a too-tight shirt on. I was translating a page from Anaïs Nin’s diary and I wanted to correct her all the time! It’s very hard to know how much freedom to move you have. In order to be a good translator, you have to do your own thing, to a certain degree. 

The English translation, it’s a beautiful translation. I think the English language is very suitable for my kind of language because it has built-in humor in it. Like when I’m being funny it’s never punch-line funny, but it’s built in the sentences. Now I’m reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch and I’m finding some of that fun quality. If you’re dissecting it, it’s very hard to find where the fun it, but it’s there in the sentences. It’s easier to find that level of humor in Swedish and English. French, maybe. German, I don’t know. But French I know a little and that will be harder. It’s a more serious language in some way.

AM: The book is funny and you’re not laughing at the characters. They do something and you’re like “Of course, you would do this!” It’s coming out of a place of life. It’s like you’re watching a cousin or a sibling. 

LS: I feel like they are my family. It was really empty when I was done with the book, not having them in my life anymore. 

AM: Again on the theme of translation, I thought it was interesting that you’ve said that you model your aesthetic style after a piano player, Roy Bittan, from the E Street Band. And I actually totally get what you mean.

LS: Listen to “Jungleland”! The piano at the beginning. I love that swooping away quality. Actually, I’ve been thinking I should send the book to Roy Bittan. 

AM: There must be somebody who has the connection! You’d be surprised, an email goes a long way. 

LS: I should talk to my American publisher. Maybe they can find him. 

AM: I want to know how you’re able to make that jump. A lot of people can’t make that jump where they see one thing in one medium like music and can’t imagine how it relates to this one like writing. I understand how that would be connected because there is a rhythmic quality to reading and constructing sentences. 

LS: And a musical quality in writing. I was a musician before I started to write. I’ve been playing music my entire life. When I was a kid, I was always writing, painting, and playing piano. I singled out writing as my main artistic output when I was 20. When I started writing Collected Works, I was playing in a band, I was in music school, and I was playing more than writing. Having musical sense and translating it to literature instead of music came pretty naturally to me. 

This next novel I’m writing is about musicians and the one of the main characters is a conductor, so I’m revisiting the musical world. I have to mourn that I gave up music and that I was never really a good musician. I’m very glad I could find an output in my writing. I can hear the beat while writing. When I read what I’ve written, I can see when I skip a beat or when it starts to wobble and get unclear. I can tell directly. I have a good ear—though not for music, but writing. For people who want to write, it’s always good to play and to draw or to do anything that has this expressive quality because it can be fruitful in some deep, mysterious way.