2023-05-31 05:01:41
Linn Ullmann (Oslo, 1966) was born into a family of artists and has inadvertently founded another. Her father was the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman; her mother, Liv Ullmann, a legend of the big screen. She, for whatever reason, came out as a writer. “It’s just that I’m a terrible actress,” she confesses between laughs on the other side of the screen. But of course being born in a family like this influences me to dedicate myself to literature, although some of the best artists in the world come from families that have nothing to do with art… In fact, my husband is a poet, and for us he was important that our children [entre los dos tienen cuatro] They did not grow up in a family of artists. I mean don’t bother me, I’m creating, I’m an artist, as if you were something very special… My father was like that, everything was organized according to his art. Everyone was there for him to work: his women, his lovers, his collaborators… I think he never cleaned the house ». Shortly after, he tells that his son has dedicated himself to the cinema and is about to start shooting his first film as a director, and that his daughter also wants to write. It will be that art calls art.
Ullmann has been exploring his past as a foreign country for some time: that is adolescence in his fifties, sometimes I dream, other times I remember, other times I am hurt. With ‘Los inquietos’ he began a trilogy of autobiographical novels, which now continues with ‘Chica, 1983’ (both in Gatopardo). This is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who comes to Paris to pose for a Vogue photographer three times her age, only to end up in something that she is part abuse and part desire. “Everything I write here, what happened before and while and after A. took my picture in Paris, is made up mostly of forgetfulness, in the same way that the body is made up mostly of water,” he writes at the beginning, thus explaining the structure of a book that twists like a night remembered from the hangover. Perhaps that is why, because of that fog, it has taken her so many years to find a style, a way to narrate what happened. “Yes, it was hard to find the choreography for this book… Memory is full of desolation, and it works in circles, coming back to the same place over and over again,” she says. And has it given you peace to achieve it at last? Does it give you peace to see her book published by her? “You don’t write to be at peace with yourself.” OK.
‘Girl, 1983’, he repeats, is a novel. Because? «Because the freedom of the novel allows you to approach certain places. The autobiography imposes a distance on you », she explains. But there is a lot of reality in there, a lot of skin, a lot of pain. A flash: the protagonist has just arrived at a photo session, a man puts his hand between her legs and she refuses. Then, another model blurts out: “Stupid little girl. If you can’t stand being touched, I don’t know what you’re doing here. “This is something that exists, that still exists: the sexualization of children. And it’s something that has been romanticized, in a way, especially with girls, but also with boys. In the eighties it was something notorious, as Brooke Shields has denounced, “says Ullmann. She does not portray herself as a victim, but she does not portray herself as an adult either, and from that lack of definition she narrates the events. “I like to write in those territories,” she adds. So what we have is a young woman who drinks a lot, a lot, who loses consciousness or her memory, who she wants as an adult but she has a “new body.” “And those changes are desperate.”
Ullmann insists that she doesn’t think she can talk about it as a trauma. «The term trauma is used a lot now, but I am very careful with that word. I would say that these events live with us in different ways, and that at a certain age we are all broken for some reason. And this, I suspect, is a requirement to write books or to pursue any other form of art.” And doesn’t the self run out as a source of stories? “My books start with me but end with other people,” she says. Maybe that’s why she declares herself allergic to alcohol as well as nuts.
#didnt #children #grow #family #artists