Vigdis Hjorth (Oslo, 1959) has not spoken to her family (except one brother) for thirty years. The cause is the sexual abuse committed by her father at home and that inspired her novel The Inheritance (2016), which won the Norwegian booksellers prize and sparked a replica novel by her sister and an avalanche of family complaints against Hjorth . She comments on it with animated resignation in an office at the headquarters of her publishing house in Oslo. At least the thing she gives her to write great works, like the recently published Has Mommy Died? (Nordic), starring a contemporary Norwegian artist at odds with her family who, after a life in the US, returns to Oslo for an exhibition and wonders what has become of her mother, whom she hasn't seen for thirty years . She begins to spy on her, as in a crime novel, and reflects on the bond that unites them, as in a Greek tragedy.
"It's a special situation not seeing your mother for so long," he continues. It all started with a real image: her driving down the street where her mother lives and feeling a great curiosity about what would have become of her ... in thirty years. The book is an investigation of that. I point out that, in my case, we stopped talking to each other 30 years ago, it was something long before the book but writing it aggravated everything. If I was able to write it, it is because my family was already broken, I would not have risked breaking it up for a book”.
"You can't get your mother out of your head," he says, "that's impossible, you're linked to her forever, even if you don't see her. To varying degrees, that happens in many families: that guy we've never seen, who doesn't come to the Christmas celebrations I don't know why, and then over the years it turns out that he was an alcoholic or a psychopath”.
One of the keys to the lack of communication between mother and daughter is that, “after 30 years, it is very difficult to open your mind and admit that maybe you were wrong. But you feel a voracious hunger for information: you know that he has divorced your father, you don't know if he has another partner, and you would like to know."
Johanna, her character, “goes back to childhood and youth, and thinks of her mother when she was young, wondering who she was, what great untreated pain she suffered, it sure wasn't easy for her. She sometimes yells: 'I would like to free my mother from her pain and for her to be free too! He is naive, and somewhat obsessive.”
Regarding the reproaches that his family makes about his books, he quotes an anecdote from Picasso: “When the Nazi Otto Abetz saw a reproduction of Guernica, he told him: 'It's the best thing you've done so far', and Picasso replied: 'I didn't do this, you did it.' I think that's a very smart answer."
Regarding motherhood, she states that "for the baby and the child, the mother is a human goddess who takes care of them, her power is enormous and it is impossible to forget that dependency you had, the enormous difference in power between the two."
Johanna is a plastic artist and paints some pictures about her family that make her close friends enmity. “She sees a woman at the train station and she feels that she could be her mother. I share the feeling that mom must be curious about me, she doesn't talk to me to punish me but she must be interested, it's very hard to think that she doesn't care about you anymore. I let Johanna do things that I never did, I just thought about them. See her again? Something can always happen, maybe if my mother gets very sick, about to die, she has the desire to see me”.
He also doesn't know if his mother has read the book. “It is impossible to know. I don't think she's going to buy it in a store, I imagine her saying 'she's already writing about bad mothers again', but maybe she has a friend who will bring it to her”.
