going off the rails: vigdis hjorth's neurotic women
or, why on earth do I feel so much kinship with this 64-year-old Norwegian white woman
Whom among us has not stumbled home tipsy – okay, admit it, pretty damn drunk – read a slightly passive-aggressive text message, wildly overreacted by sending almost 10 messages back in varying degrees of paranoia, shame, and anger, and driven yourself crazy by imagining scenarios that probably aren’t true (but hey, you never know), and convinced yourself that the whole world, but especially this person, is out to get you?1
Well, Vigdis Hjorth’s protagonists do this a lot.
I think she’s popular enough now that I won’t bother giving a whole biography of who she is (if you don’t know, google it, or better yet, read the books yourself), but her books are genuinely some of the most interesting novels I’ve read in the last five years or so, and she’s quickly become one of my favourite authors. They are strange books about largely similar protagonists thrown into wildly different scenarios, preoccupied with social norms and conventions & how the whole thing seems to be a vivid hallucination that we are willingly taking part in, and I would even venture to say that these are actually horror stories, in a way.
Not conventional horror, but rather, a kind of dystopian cringe horror. Take, for example, having to go and identify your coworker’s body in a foreign country because his ex-wife refuses to go.2 Or stalking your estranged mother, haunting her door and following her when she leaves the house.3 Or, my personal favourite, writing an entire novel about the inheritance politics within your family (and more soberly, how you were gaslit about your own CSA for years by everyone within your family).4
Hjorth is obsessed with mothers. If not the horror of having a mother’s shadow looming over you, then the horror of being a mother and having to deal with children you’ve given birth to but barely know anymore – or perhaps you never really knew them. Yet, by virtue of having come from a mother, the horror of mothers is already an inextricable part of you, or as Hjorth says in an interview about Is Mother Dead: “I believe that a child’s mother or a child’s primary carer will, in one way or another, always live within the child, even when that child is an adult.”
I think that Hjorth’s fixation on the mother-daughter relationship is nothing new, but her way of portraying that toxic relationship is just so gripping. Her protagonists are constantly grappling with how to talk to mothers, where the unspoken thing is that mothers are supposed to instantly, and intimately understand you, even though the truth is that while you may have come from them, you are nothing alike. And the reality of having your own children is that they grow further and further apart from you, and at times, can be a burden.
The final point above, about children being burdens, is even more acutely felt because nearly all of Hjorth’s protagonists are artists. Painters, writers, and textile artists, they grapple with the age-old struggle of being a mother and needing the time to be an artist. I’m currently reading Clare Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, where she investigates the idea of mother-as-artist-as-monster, and the complex battle between the two concepts is almost perfectly encapsulated in Hjorth’s work. A House in Norway sees a woman who is also a mother just trying to have some peace and quiet away from the demands that motherhood and existing alongside others asks of her.
Hjorth’s work somehow also touches on so many other things – wider concerns like internalised racism, the necessity of the postal service, the feeling of loneliness and being unable to understand others, but also needing to act and feel normal. There’s also a lot of alcoholism and self-destructive behaviour scattered throughout – Hjorth admits that she herself drinks – not sure how much of this is based on the author’s real life, but I’m not an autofiction expert, and to be honest I do feel like sometimes knowing that it’s partly autobiographical leads us to make judgements on the author in a way that isn’t helpful to exploring the text.
But ultimately, all the women that Hjorth writes about are still on a quest for a sense of self, one that is constantly in flux because of these ideas of motherhood, mothering & daughtering, and how other people view you. There’s a bigger essay to be written here but that day is not today – these are mostly just the thoughts floating above the churning river below, and I don’t really feel that I’ve finished thinking through all the stuff she’s written about.
I’m excited for the next English-language release coming from her, If Only, which is supposedly her most important piece of work, so that’s something to look forward to.
To end on a more personal note, I’ve been on a hot streak of excellent books recently, which has seriously improved my mood and made life feel worth living again. I’ve also been tinkering around with the idea of digital gardens, possibly considering creating an online space like Neocities/etc where shorter-form ideas and thoughts can exist.
If you’re interested in playing some short games, I recently completed a 10k-word experimental play/interactive fiction centered around Bluebeard’s wives that you can play over here, on Itch.io.
Some other housekeeping: I somehow gained a lot of subscribers over the last two months or so, funneled over from a much more popular mutual’s newsletter. If this is the first time you are receiving an email from me: be not afraid, etc. Here I mostly talk about writing, reading, and occasionally about how miserable I am. Welcome!
From A House in Norway
From Long Live the Posthorn!
From Is Mother Dead
From Will and Testament. Apparently Hjorth’s own sister wrote a novel as well rebutting the entire premise of Hjorth’s novel called Free Will. I haven’t been able to read the latter, not sure if it’s been translated into English yet? If someone knows, do point me in the right direction.