Novel (Danish)
Karen Fastrup: Hungerhjerte, 2018
Memoir novel
An amazing memoir novel about the author and translator Karen’s own life of living like a crazy bullet, having a wild animal inside her, and in between behaving insanely. About a difficult childhood with a complicated father, loss of a younger brother, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts that later in life mean that she has to be hospitalized in the psychiatric emergency ward as she attacks her boyfriend with a knife. You are brought fully underneath the skin of Karen, who until then has lived an almost normal yet different life with lovers, children, and career. It is a great reading experience because through Karen’s everyday life you get sucked into her sometimes chaotic thinking and an authentic meeting with psychiatry and treatment institutions, about her fear of being diagnosed (with borderline) and about her belief in the future when learning to accommodate and accept the terms she is given when she e.g. multi dates via Tinder and regains her desire to write.
Picture from Vildumed.dk