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Vigdis Hjorth: ‘I won’t talk about my family… I’m in enough trouble’

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/04/vigdis-hjorth-will-and-testament-interview-i-wont-talk-about-my-family

The writer’s hard-hitting autobiographical novel sparked sensation in her native Norway and fury in her own family. Here she talks about truth, fiction and, naturally, Knausgaard

“Most families have a kind of official family story,” Vigdis Hjorth says. “‘This is how we do Christmas’, and so on. If one member does not share this official, nice story, there is a big tension. I think I have given a voice to that person who has a more complex story, who is not prepared to be part of it. The family won’t listen to her, and there is a great deal of unpleasantness…”

Hjorth, 60, is talking about her unsettling, beautifully constructed novel Will and Testament, in which a woman in her 50s, a magazine editor in Oslo, capsizes her family by insisting that her father sexually abused and raped her as a child. Because Bergjlot, the narrator of the novel, shares many elements of Hjorth’s own autobiography and because the first-person voice of the book is so directly and convincingly written, it has ignited the ongoing controversy in Norway over “virkelighetslitteratur”, or “reality fiction”, and the ethics of using details of family history in novels.

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