Fine Gråbøl in Telegraph
A beautiful profile of Fine Gråbøl, author of What Kingdom (Archipelago, 2024) was published this week in Telegraph. From the piece:
Life inside psychiatric institutions is a well-worn literary subject. The problem, Gråbøl says, is that when writers try to capture that world, they often end up depicting it as “a strange, secretive, closed place that you don’t have access to.” She didn’t want her novel to “feel like it invited a reader into a foreign place”, and she was keen to avoid the usual clichés. “We have a tendency when we write about mental illness to fall into the same old stereotypical tropes or metaphors,” she says. “I wanted to shake up this language, which felt very frozen, felt maybe as locked as clinical language.”
By the time Gråbøl wrote What Kingdom, soon after the birth of her first child, she hadn’t been in contact with Denmark’s psychiatric health system for about a decade. Did she worry, I ask, that revisiting the youth unit – even if just in fiction – might set back her recovery? She shakes her head. “It was completely wonderful to write the book.”
[ . . . ]
[Fine is] thoughtful, and careful not to be drawn on subjects about which she doesn’t feel comfortable making grand statements. But a bold vein of idealism runs through What Kingdom, a call for society to adapt to people with the mental-health problems she describes, rather than lock them away.
Above all, she wishes that the emphasis would shift away from the suffering individual and onto their broader context. We need to become better, as a society, at making room for people who aren’t fully functional citizens. Gråbøl’s narrator phrases it as a question: “Could we not imagine treatments that are instead externally directed, involving the outside world gearing itself towards a wider and more comprehensive emotional spectrum?” Gråbøl’s answer, though, is the same as my own: “I don’t know.”