AS I’VE already related, my sister Britt went with Erland to Expo’s office on the morning after Stieg’s death, and I asked her to take my partner’s backpack along with her. It contained his agenda, with booked lectures, meetings and deadlines, the detailed outline for the next issue, and the Expo laptop. This computer thus belongs to the magazine, but it also contains Stieg’s articles, his correspondence with Searchlight, his research, the names of his informants, etc. For this reason, the laptop is protected by the Swedish Constitution’s Freedom of the Press Act, which says that a journalist’s sources must be kept confidential. This computer, unprotected by any secret password, remained in the Expo office for more than six months. At the time, someone suggested that it be put in the office safe, but the safe was locked and only Stieg knew the combination!
The laptop contains the fourth volume of the Millennium saga … perhaps.
This text is a little more than two hundred pages long, because when we went on vacation that last summer, Stieg had already written more than a hundred and sixty pages. Between going over the first volume a few times in the final editing, finishing the third one, and his work at Expo, Stieg probably didn’t have time in the weeks before his death to add more than fifty pages to the fourth volume.
I have no intention of summarizing here the plot of the fourth novel. I would like to say, however, that in this book Lisbeth Salander gradually breaks free of all of her ghosts and enemies. Every time she manages to take revenge on someone who has harmed her, physically or psychologically, she has the tattoo symbolizing that person removed. Lisbeth’s piercings are her way of following the fashion of others her age, but those tattoos are her war paint. To some extent, the young woman behaves like a native in an urban jungle, acting like an animal, relying on instinct, of course, but always on the alert as well for what may lie ahead, sniffing out danger. Like Lisbeth, I trust my instincts when I encounter new people and situations. As Stieg well knew.
In the space of two years, Stieg wrote two thousand pages of the trilogy, almost without notes or research (except for small details). How did he do it? Simple: the basic material for these books is our personal lives and our thirty-two years together. The trilogy is the fruit of Stieg’s experience, but of mine as well. Rooted in Stieg’s childhood, but in mine, too. Rooted in our battles, our commitments, our trips, our passions, our fears.… These books are the jigsaw puzzle of our lives. That’s why I cannot tell exactly what part of The Millennium Trilogy comes from Stieg and what comes from me. What I can say is that if anyone ever decided to take up the challenge to continue the adventure, each book would require years of work.
The vicissitudes of life arranged for Stieg, not me, to bring all of those things together to create literature. Ironically, some people insist that I made no contribution whatsoever to the trilogy—while others claim that I wrote the whole thing. I can only say that just as Stieg and I shared a common language, we often wrote together.
In August 2005, Per-Erik Nilsson submitted an offer to the Larssons and to Norstedts in which he asked that I be given control of the moral rights to Stieg’s work. That way I would have been able to work legally on his texts and finish the fourth book, which I am capable of doing. My lawyer felt that this prospect would inspire the Larssons to find a solution to our impasse.
The Larssons said no.
It should be made clear here that nothing in Swedish inheritance law obliges anyone to inherit a legacy. No one is prevented from giving away all or part of an inheritance. The law also allows the moral rights to an author’s oeuvre to be transferred to someone else.
Stieg’s and my situation—and that of many other couples I mention in my book on unmarried partners, where the surviving companion loses everything after the other one dies—shows that these archaic laws must change, because they treat intellectual creations as if they were plots of land to be added to the relatives’ nearby farmland. When one unmarried partner dies, the other is abruptly stripped of all the couple has built up together, and is thereby prevented from developing their joint creation. And when this legacy is handed over to people who have had nothing to do with it, this is not only immoral but also detrimental to the creative elements in society, since it’s the passive who win and the active who lose. Which means that society stagnates. This unfair situation, publicized through my case, has led many people in Sweden to make their domestic union legally safer, sometimes through marriage.
WITHOUT THE support of our true friends—who do not camp out on TV soundstages, trotting out apocryphal memories and bizarre stories about Stieg for the media or in books—I would never have made it through these last years. This book is also my thanks to them.
Today I’m still fighting to control the literary rights to The Millennium Trilogy and all of Stieg’s political writing. I’m fighting for him, for me, for us.
I do not want his name to be an industry or a brand. The way things are going, what’s to stop me from one day seeing his name on a bottle of beer, a packet of coffee, or a car? I don’t want his struggles and ideals to be sullied and exploited. I know how he would react in every situation I’m facing today: he would fight.
Like Stieg, that’s what I must do.
On the evening of Stieg’s burial, I wrote that I wanted “to survive another year.” A few months later, on the anniversary of his death, I hoped “to learn how to live again.” Today, the words I calmly write are … “to live.” My family, my work, my commitments, my friends: they are what lets me live each and every day.
For Stieg. Because he would ask that of me, the way he did in his farewell letter before he set out for Africa in 1977 when he was twenty-two.
So for me, for us, and because that’s the way we are, I will keep going.