PEOPLE HAVE pointed out to me that, aside from Mikael Blomkvist’s sister, there are no conventional mothers in The Millennium Trilogy, or any traditional families, either. Lisbeth Salander’s mother remained a passive victim of her husband Zala’s violence and was unable to protect her child, which leads to tragedy. Brain-damaged by his beatings, she ends her days in a clinic where she dies relatively young. As for the women of the Vanger family, the worst of them are bad mothers, like Isabella Vanger, Harriet and Martin’s mother, who knew that her husband was abusing their son (who was himself raping his sister), but she “paid no attention to all that.” At best, these women are uncaring mothers, or they don’t have children, like Erika Berger.
When I think about this, I don’t believe it’s an accident. Stieg and I grew up motherless, since we were both brought up by our grandparents. But the most attentive and affectionate of grandmothers, as ours were, cannot replace a child’s mama.
Being raised by that older generation also meant that in a way we were growing up in the nineteenth century, in a time untouched by modern mores. We were taught old-fashioned values, a strict and sometimes severe morality. In our homes, an honorable reputation did not depend on money and success, but on integrity. Once given, a person’s word was sacred. These rules were inviolable.
Stieg and I were alike in many, many ways, especially in our thinking and our reactions to things. We found that funny, but it was hardly surprising, after all, since we shared the same background.
I was born on November 17, 1953, in Lövånger, about sixty miles north of Umeå, in the Skellefteå Municipality of Västerbotten County. I was the oldest of three children born a little more than a year apart. Our parents separated when I was seven, and we children stayed on the family farm with our father and paternal grandparents. Father hadn’t wanted to become a farmer, and although he’d left school at the age of thirteen, he’d still managed to become a journalist at a regional daily newspaper. My parents had married for love and could have spent their lives together, if only they had lived in the city. Gudrun, my mother, was a secondary school graduate and had worked as a secretary in a metallurgy factory before her marriage. For a time, my grandmother had hoped that her daughter-in-law would help out on the farm, but she soon saw how unfit for country life Mama was in her lipstick, high heels, and tailored suits. Such frills were completely useless, in Grandmother’s eyes, whereas I thought Mama was lively and pretty. My parents’ divorce was a harrowing experience, and their two families also split apart during the ordeal. My father obtained custody of his children, which was a rare thing at the time, by showing that he had a job, a place to live, and that my paternal grandparents would look after us. I also think the fact that my father belonged to the Liberal People’s Party and knew influential people in the area weighed heavily in his favor.
So my mother went to live on her own in Stockholm, where she studied and became a nurse. In thirty-one years, I saw her only six times. She never remarried. My father died in 1977, and my mother died of cancer in December 1992, during the Christmas holidays. Although my paternal grandmother, a kind and honest woman, felt that my father had made a mistake in marrying my mother, she would never, ever, have tried to prevent her from seeing us again. So I just don’t know what went on in Mama’s head. I think she was a sensitive and psychologically fragile person. She suffered cruelly at being separated from her children, but we were far away and she hadn’t much money, so what could she do? When she went away in 1961, my siblings and I lost not just our mama, but our entire maternal family, forever.
And then I felt absolutely abandoned, just as Stieg did when he was separated from his grandparents in 1962.
STIEG AND my grandmother got along wonderfully from the moment they met. She used to say that he was “a good man,” while he thought she was “fabulous.” I must say that she was a determined woman who knew what she wanted. So did her father: after sailing the seven seas for more than twenty-one years, he became a farmer so that he could marry his beloved young fiancée. My grandmother had a way of saying, “Well, here’s what I think,” that gave us all pause before we embarked on something. The subtext was obvious: “You, you do what you want, but you’ll be responsible for whatever happens.”
When I met Stieg, his mama, Vivianne, became my “substitute” mother. She was another woman of strong will. And like my grandmother, she was the one who ran her family. I really admired her. She managed a ready-to-wear store, but her ambition was to change society, and to the amazement of the local political bigwigs, she was elected to the city council on the Social Democratic ticket. “Nothing mysterious about it,” she explained with a grin. “What with all the customers traipsing through the shop, everyone in town knew who I was!” And since I’m an architect, when Vivianne joined the municipal urban planning commission, the two of us had one more thing to share.
Stieg and Vivianne were very much alike, and anything they did was done with wholehearted commitment. He was fond of her, but not in the way one loves a mother; it was more as if he felt comfortably close to her. And he treated his father and brother as if they were his foster family. After we moved to Stockholm in 1977, we didn’t often travel the six hundred or so miles to Umeå. In Önnesmark, a village in my native locality of Lövånger, Stieg’s parents had a vacation home (coincidentally enough, the house had been built by my paternal great-uncle), and they loaned the place to us a few times during the summer months. In the 1980s, we also spent a few Christmases in Umeå with Stieg’s parents, but most of the time we spent holidays with my family: Christmas, Easter, and Midsummer’s Day—which we Swedes celebrate lavishly, feasting on seasonal foods, putting up decorations of greenery and wildflowers, and dancing to folk music around a huge maypole. We even considered making Midsummer’s Day our national holiday!
Then Vivianne got breast cancer, and in August of 1991, on her way home after a treatment session at the hospital, she suffered an aneurysm. We immediately flew up from Stockholm to be with her. She was unconscious, but I held her hand and told her softly about Stieg, our plans, what we were working on, as if everything were fine. I felt that she could hear me. The next day, she died. She had waited for us. Just as my mother would do the following year. She too had had breast cancer, and then she was diagnosed with lung cancer, which she fought with a tenacity that astonished everyone in the clinic for palliative care where she was hospitalized. I can still see her sitting on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket, smoking and coughing. My brother and I began taking turns at her bedside, but my sister, who lived in London, was unable to join us before Christmas. So my mother hung on. At the end of December, with her three children gathered around her, she died. So our two mamas both chose the moment when they would let go.
Not Stieg. He was ambushed, taken by surprise.
AFTER WE bought our apartment on the large island of Södermalm—a district in central Stockholm—in 1991, we celebrated all our holidays in the capital with my brother and sister. Erland, Stieg’s father, would come to the city from time to time with his new companion, Gun, and then we’d have coffee or dinner together at a café or restaurant, depending on our various schedules. Erland often urged Stieg to come see his brother, if only for a short while whenever we drove up to clear brush from the forest around the small cabin I shared with my siblings in Önnesmark, but there was almost no bond between the two brothers. This is why we did not attend Joakim’s wedding or any of the family birthday celebrations. Stieg would sidestep the subject with Erland by explaining that his work kept him fairly busy. Still, I do remember a few times when we were passing through Umeå and had coffee with Joakim and his family just to please Erland. Joakim clearly doesn’t remember all this, as he has told the media about having quite strong ties with Stieg. In thirty years, Joakim came to our home only twice: once at the end of the 1970s, and again when Stieg died. Stieg and I always saw a lot of my brother and sister, on the other hand, because—after I had lost both parents and grandparents and no longer had any relationship with my mother’s family, and because Stieg did not feel close to his remaining blood relatives—my brother and sister were our real family.