Galicismos

By Thea Pettersson

”Hope is the last to leave man, but what is heaviest to carry”

>I meet the writer Johanna Thydell at “Salon de Livre” in Paris. We talk about her novel “Glowing Stars” which has just been published in French. The novel tells the story of a young girl named Jenna. Jenna tries to live a normal teenage life but carries a dark secret – her mother might die in cancer. She has made a promise that if her mother dies, she will kill herself.

>With Johanna we talk about the importance to mix humor and seriousness and the 3^rd person narrative, motivations for writing the novel and her writing process, her interest in childhood and her favorite expressions.

>Even though the novel has a dark theme – death, it never feels heavy to read. Johanna tells that it is very important for her to create a balance of humor and seriousness in her works. As “Glowing Stars” has such a dark theme she had to lighten up the story and bring some hope in to it. We also talk about the narrative perspective. The novel is written in third person which creates a distance between the reader and the main person Jenna. Nevertheless the reader is not less touched by the pain that Jenna goes through. Johanna tells that when starting with the novel she never had an intention of telling the story from a first person perspective. She did not want to write “I” or “me” as people would think that the novel was about her. She says that even though she has been in the same situation as Jenna but she presses on the fact that she is not Jenna. Today, after having published the book and let some time pass, she likes the fact that she wrote the novel in thirds person – she says it creates a “good distance”.

“Can I be honest?” Johanna says when I ask about her motivations for writing the story about Jenna. “I knew that it was a good story. I’ve had an experience many others haven’t. I wrote it with a distance and knew that it would be good if I did it well.” We talk about the fact of placing oneself or ones experiences in a novel. Johanna says that it is “a high price to pay, you use your emotions and it turns yourself in side out and you don’t feel good all the time”. Laughing she says “we think a lot, we feel a lot, we are a mess, writers”. She says that it is a nice feeling in the end. Obviously, as she has written a good novel she is happy, however the process is hard.

We talk about her process when working on a new project. She says that the process is different depending on the project and also her process differs today from when she started writing. With her first novel, “Glowing Stars” Johanna tells that today when she starts writing she usually has a vague idea, for instance she has the characters ready in her mind but does not know what to do with them. This makes the process very long as she tries out different paths and continually abandons ideas to find new ones. Binomially se concludes “I don’t like my process; it takes a lot of energy. But I think it creates good novels because I write whatever feels right when I am in my writing, so I like my process and I hate it”.

“I am interested in how different things affect you when you grow up and also I have an interest in families.” Johanna reveals that she is very interested in psychology and how ones childhood makes us who we are. She tells that the childhood keeps “popping up” later in life, she is herself a mother now but some things never leave you. Thus, as childhood is one of her interests, it is a central theme she writes about. “I tried writing about adults – but I sucked” she says laughing. I try to assure her that this probably was not the case but she repeats “It wasn’t good at all”. She says that she is open for new ideas so maybe in the future she will try again “I would like to, if I had a story”. Also families interest her – families staying together versus not staying together. This theme can also be found in her other novels and she assures me that it is okay to base ones works on the same themes as long as you vary it.  “I think many authors actually write the same book over and over but vary them a bit”.

To finish, Johanna shares with me some of her favorite expressions; “Good enough is enough”. Laughing she says that she does not live by it – but she tries. To her, the expression means that you do not need to be perfect. She also has/had an expression as a magnet on her refrigerator saying “Deviens ce que tu es” “Become what you are”, which she strongly likes. To conclude I quote Johanna from her novel “Glowing Stars”; “Hoppet är det sista som lämnar människan, men det som är tyngst att bära” ”Hope is the last to leave man, but what is heaviest to carry”. Johanna sentimentally says that she still likes the quotation, “maybe I should tattoo it here (demonstrating on her upper arm)” she jokes. “For me it is true. I am hopeful and pessimistic at the same time”.

For more information about the author and other works, visit her website: www.johannathydell.se