For Denmark, I read The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood—Youth—Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, and wow wow WOW. (Just imagine I wrote “wow” about four billion times.) What an extraordinary memoir.

The Copenhagen Trilogy brings together three memoirs that were published as separate books. Childhood describes Tove’s childhood in a working class neighborhood in Copenhagen with a dad who is frequently unemployed and a mother who is narcissistic, manipulative, and cruel. Youth describes the time after her confirmation, when she goes to work at the age of 14, and starts dating and having sex. Dependency begins with her first marriage (loveless, sexless) spans her second and third marriages, during which she becomes addicted to prescription medication, and ends with her fourth marriage. 

Tove Ditlevsen wrote a stark, matter-of-fact confessional memoir that says the things we usually do not care to admit to ourselves. I just opened my copy at random and noticed this quote:

It bothers me a lot that I don’t seem to own any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people’s reactions. It’s as if I’m only moved by things that come to me indirectly. I can cry when I see a picture in the newspaper of an unfortunate family that’s been evicted, but when I see the same ordinary sight in reality, it doesn’t touch me.

The Copenhagen Trilogy, p. 94.

The memoir does not shy away from uncomfortable subjects, including two illegal abortions, addiction to pain medications, and unfulfilling sex. She describes these matters so bluntly, almost with a medical precision, that reading this memoir at times felt like the literary equivalent of jumping into Arctic waters. Your soul shudders from the shock. Yet her writing style is so compelling, I was happy to dive deeper and deeper into those frigid waters, paddling around the the raw, intimate details of Ditlevesen’s unhappiness.

This is not the sort of survivor memoir that inflates your heart and leaves you believing anything is possible. It will instead shred your soul and live it in ribbons– ribbons which are poetically arranged, but ribbons nevertheless. And yet… there was something about this memoir, with all its anguish and aching loneliness, that left me craving more. It felt perhaps like an antidote to the all-too-pervasive social media that presents perfect glimpses into influencers curated lives.

There is a lot more Tove Ditlevsen in my future. Especially whenever my soul yearns a good cathartic shredding.