UNTIL 2007, I continued to work regularly with Expo. My chief occupations were selecting authors for the website devoted to Stieg and translating any articles that were in English. At first, I often worked at the office to show that I wasn’t abandoning the magazine, but I also went there because I needed to distract myself from missing Stieg. His death prodded many people’s consciences, so Expo’s financial situation had considerably improved: beginning in November 2004, spontaneous donations started coming in, and in early 2005 the Förening artister mot nazister (Association of Artists Against Nazis) committed itself for six years to an annual contribution of 500,000 kronor ($72,000). In addition, the Statens Kulturåd (National Council of Culture) was now providing financial aid for the magazine’s printing costs, and Expo had begun a long-term collaboration with the publishing firm Natur & Kultur.
My last contribution to the magazine and the foundation was to renovate the office in 2007. Since the budget was barely 30,000 kronor (a little over $4,000), I spent three months washing and repainting the walls and ceilings, which were in poor shape. I wanted a warm shade for the floor, so I picked a dark red. For everything else, I used black and white, “newspaper” colors. I also built a conference table with some salvaged materials. The net effect is rather sober and spare, except for the archives room, where folders and old newspapers are piled up ad infinitum.
Today, a representative of Expo serves on the jury for the Stieg Larsson Prize, an award organized by the Larsson family and the Norstedts Publishing Group.
Expo has survived and follows its path. I will follow mine.
SINCE AUTUMN 2007, my apartment in Stockholm has belonged to me free and clear. Almost three years after Stieg’s death, the Larssons suddenly had the official papers delivered to me. Until then, I’d been left hanging, ready at a moment’s notice to abandon ship, so for two years I’d been living surrounded by cardboard boxes. At last relieved of uncertainty, I unpacked my things and threw a big housewarming party, inviting everyone who’d stood by me through thick and thin. Nowadays, books are taking up more and more room in my six hundred square feet of space and will soon start feeling crowded. Not me! I’ve repainted the walls here and had a new kitchen put in, white and olive green. The apartment no longer resembles what it was when Stieg lived here. I could no longer bear opening my front door onto our former life, where the slightest detail reminded me that he was gone. I also bought a secondhand oriental rug for the living room, cheap: it was dirty and damaged, but it’s a Kashgai woven by one of the craftswomen of that nomadic Iranian tribe. On it is a garden full of trees and flowers, with some ducks, I believe, strolling around in the greenery. After washing and mending the rug, I laid it on the floor, put on a little music, and danced the salsa barefoot on this new realm. I felt in my body that the apartment had become mine, and that my home had lost that painful echo of happy times lost forever.
I RETURNED to my professional life in the building industry, still in the domain of sustainable development. This is my world. A hard and demanding world, but a fair one. My work has meaning because it acts on reality. I can use my skills freely and make decisions I find effective. This isn’t the virtual reality of the Millennium industry, where I can’t decide anything at all.
This Millennium industry was born in July 2005, seven months after Stieg died, when Men Who Hate Women (in English: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) came out in Sweden, and it has become a juggernaut with the success of the trilogy: more than forty million books have been sold to this date throughout the world, not to mention the audiobooks and the films for TV and the cinema. Along with this industry, a myth has sprung up: the Millennium Stieg. Everything under the sun has since been written and said about him. And usually by people who barely knew him, knew nothing of our life, and shared none of our struggles. Why? Because Stieg and I were never celebrities, never got the red-carpet treatment at evening premieres, never had the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, or El País clamoring to interview us the way they do now to talk to me about Stieg and the trilogy. Stieg’s real life, like mine, was often boring, always hardworking, and sometimes dangerous. That’s why those people who today have so much to say about him never came anywhere near us.
THE MILLENNIUM Trilogy is not just a good story made up by a good author of good crime novels. These books talk about the need to fight to defend one’s ideals, and the refusal to give up, to sell oneself, or to grovel before someone powerful. The novels speak of values, justice, of journalism in the noble sense of the word, of the integrity and efficiency some people bring to their jobs, including the police. The novels talk about morality, too. The virtual reality that has overtaken Stieg today has cast him as the hero of the trilogy. Well, Stieg didn’t wait for the Millennium books to be what he was. And in that reductive vision of Stieg, certain people have even tried to erase me from the map—along with our thirty-two years together! Unfortunately, this attitude is fueled in part by misogyny, and not just toward me: wherever the myth of Stieg Larsson is involved, women are always devalued, whereas he collaborated mostly with women all his life. In April 2007, my sister told me she’d just noticed that someone had changed the Wikipedia entry on Stieg: ever since November 18, 2006, the site now said that he had never lived with his grandparents, but always with his mother and father! And where the text had previously said that Eva Gabrielsson was his lifelong partner at the time of his death, now it read: “with whom he was living periodically at the time of his death.” The link with my interview on the problems with his estate, which had appeared in Attention, an economic journal, had also been removed.
SOMEWHERE AROUND 2006, the foreign media began to take an interest in the man behind The Millennium Trilogy, at first in the Scandinavian countries, then in Europe. Now members of the media from the United States and Australia come to Stockholm to talk to me about Stieg. They assume—correctly—that I must be the person with the most interesting things to say, after three decades of life with him.
THE JOURNALISTS invariably ask the same questions, in the same order. The first one comes out like clockwork: Does everything shown in the trilogy (corruption, abuses of power, discrimination and violence against women, etc.) really exist in Sweden?
When I reply that most of the facts, events, and characters are real, the journalists are astounded. It’s strange that Sweden always seems like a model to many other nations, when here we have the same problems found everywhere else. These interviews show me that the trilogy has taken some of the luster off Sweden’s image as a progressive and egalitarian model for human rights.
The second question is rooted in the journalists’ astonishment that I am not considered Stieg’s widow after all those years spent together. How can our country allow such a situation to exist? A good question.
The Millennium Trilogy is today one of the most important Swedish exports, with—I repeat—more than forty million copies sold worldwide. But the trilogy is more than a few books: it’s a phenomenon that has had two major effects. The first is to have allowed a new image of Sweden to spread all over the globe. The second is that Stieg and the trilogy have become a kind of merchandise that can be endlessly commercialized.
THAT IS why I asked to be put in charge of Stieg’s literary estate. Every offer made by my lawyers since 2006 has reflected that wish. Every offer has left the Larssons free to choose the percentage of royalties assigned to me in payment for such work, which would thus allow them to remain the beneficiaries of most of the revenues. A long silence would always follow each of our offers … until their NO arrived. My lawyer, Sara Pers-Krause, summed things up for the Swedish media in November 2009: “We would like to emphasize that the important thing for us is the management of Stieg Larsson’s intellectual property and that we have, to this end, presented different requests since the spring of 2006 without ever receiving a single reply to any of our offers.”
AFTER FEBRUARY 2009 and all through the summer, the newspapers played up the negotiations between Yellow Bird and Sony’s production company in Hollywood over an American adaptation of The Millennium Trilogy. Familiar with the moral values of the United States and knowing that, unlike Sweden, twelve American states have laws guaranteeing the inheritance rights of common-law wives, I was curious to see what would happen. I was not disappointed.
ON OCTOBER 25, 2009, the Swedish evening paper Aftonbladet called me to discuss an article that would appear on the 26th in the daily Dagens Nyheter. Did I have any comment to make regarding the 2 million kronor (about $300,000) the Larssons would be paying me? I replied that I didn’t know anything about that, and neither did my lawyer. And nothing was published.
One week later, on November 2, the rival daily Svenska Dagbladet explained in its columns that the Larssons were now offering me 20 million kronor (almost $3 million). All I could say was that once again, my lawyer and I had been left out of that loop.
That same day, my lawyer called the Larssons’ new lawyer to state clearly that a newspaper article could not be considered a serious offer, and that we expected something more formal. This news made the rounds of the foreign media.
One month later, Variety reported in America that “the deal hasn’t closed yet; it’s been gestating for six months because of a rights dispute between Larsson’s parents and his longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson.”
IT WAS at this point that discussion of the management of Stieg’s literary estate resumed among the Larssons, our lawyers, and me.
In the course of these negotiations, the Larssons offered me a seat on the board of their company, which administers the revenues generated by The Millennium Trilogy. This position would have given me access to contracts and financial reports without allowing me any control over how the trilogy and Stieg’s political writings were used. His intellectual property could be sold, rewritten, changed—and my role would have been that of a simple consultant, heeded or ignored at will by the two owners of the company.
In April 2010, my lawyer offered a compromise: I would have the right to manage “the other texts,” meaning everything but The Millennium Trilogy. And we waited for an answer.
IN MAY 2010, a book I’d written with Gunnar von Sydow was published: Sambo: ensammare än du tror (Concubine: More Alone Than You Think). In January 2008, I’d begun to wonder if my predicament might be more common than I thought: cohabitation without benefit of marriage is widespread in Sweden, so many people must have been in my position, and in the course of my research I naturally discovered many men and women who were my companions in misfortune. My coauthor and I found out something astonishing, however: our most solid arguing point—the significant number of couples involved—vanished in a flash! As it turns out, we are all only a minority for the government, since the National Swedish Institute of Statistics only counts couples who have children together. Everyone else is classified as “single.”*
SIX weeks after our compromise offer was made, Joakim and Erland Larsson replied simultaneously, via a press release and an email to my lawyer, that they were breaking off negotiations with me.
FIAT JUSTITIA, pereat mundus. Let justice be done, though all the world perish.
* Sweden is one of the first countries to have tried to regulate the situation of unmarried partners by passing a law of minimal protection for the “weakest” partner: division of the home in 1973, and of community property in 1987. In 2003, these rights were extended to homosexual couples living together.
Today this law is clearly most useful to couples who separate. When one partner dies intestate, the surviving partner falls into a legal black hole—unlike the situation faced by a married couple, where the survivor inherits automatically unless a will stipulates otherwise. So, when two people live together without being married or having children and one partner dies intestate, the legal problems of inheritance are worked out amicably.
Or not. In France, for example, ever since 1999 a pacte civil de solidarité, a legal form of civil union, has granted inheritance rights to the surviving partner if there is a will to this effect, or if a declaration was made when the PACS was registered stipulating that all property acquired after the date of the PACS would be held in common. (Sambo: ensammare än du tror, Eva Gabrielsson and Gunnar von Sydow, Blue Publishing, 2010.)