Diary of despair

In September 2021, the Swedish writer Johanna Ekström was diagnosed with a fatal melanoma of the eye. She was fifty-one and had been writing for thirty years, publishing fourteen books in various genres – poetry, fiction and two memoirs – but this is the first of her books to be available in English. It is thanks to her close friend, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, that we have it now in this clear, unobtrusive translation. Two weeks before her death in April 2022, Ekström asked Rausing if she would transcribe the thirteen notebooks she had been writing since October 2019. And the Walls Became the World All Around is the astonishing result of what is in effect a posthumous collaboration between the friends, with Rausing selecting, commenting and giving background information as Ekström’s text moves through an intense, free-associative mosaic of memories, reflections and dreams in the final two years of her life.

“The notebooks are frightening”, Rausing tells us. At times, they certainly are. Terrible dreams are recorded: “Years of dreams, nightmares about desolation and perhaps injustice, to be an outcast or to be forced into exile, leaving everything behind”, writes Ekström. They’re “fragments from horror movies”, mostly involving senseless violence, inflicted or witnessed. They leave her shaken, bewildered; “unsafe”. “On the sofa early morning anxiety courses through me like seawater on pebbles as the waves withdraw.”

Ekström’s notebooks are fraught with desolation, even before “the subterranean panic” that Rausing senses creeping in after her terminal diagnosis. She lives alone with her thirteen-year-old daughter and falls in love with a writer, “N”. There are “miracle days” with him in the summer of 2020, but when he sinks into depression, she finds his “aloofness, absence and distance” almost unbearable. Her mother is dying in a care home, mute and unresponsive. The pandemic has struck and the snow-stilled streets she sees from her Stockholm flat are eerily unpeopled. She notes the birds, the clouds, a beloved tree outside her window and how it changes daily. She listens: “Layers of sound, harmonising with layers of green”. She thinks of “loneliness and what surrounds it”. Sometimes she’s overwhelmed by a sense of herself as other, perhaps not quite human – “The crisis. The thought: if I were an animal I would be inedible. Saturated with adrenaline, anguish, anxiety”. Reading this book can be bleak. Yet the wonder of it is that it is also gripping, vibrant and propulsive, driven as much by Ekström’s relationship with writing as it is by that with herself and her illness.

“The world remains unreal unless I call it into being”, she tells us. “Nothing is more real than these pencilled words … Nothing is more alive. They fill the flat: a small lung, breathing. A minor circulatory system, blood pulsing, hissing, whispering.” She has friends and she sees them. She bakes scones, warms croissants, dances, watches television with her daughter, but all the while, and increasingly as she moves towards death, she struggles towards a method of work that might somehow bring together all that is fragmented in her experience of being alive.

Somewhere in Book 10, when she has been told she has only months to live, Ekström dreams of a man who tells her: “The independence nut must be cracked”. “‘Cracked’, she thinks, is “a terrible word”, yet it is a crucial one for her. On the following page, she dreams that a hostile stranger instructs her on how to shape her thoughts: “Talk in sequences. Talk in sequences, and keep to the subject”. She’s aware that the seeming jumble of what she puts on paper will lead to no conventional text, but also that there is no straightforward way to curate herself – either in the world or in the leaving of it. She brooks no boundaries. The walls must break to reveal the world all around.

“Writing is the safest act I can perform”, she decides. “I know that it’s precisely the impossible which is my only possibility.” At the very end, she takes us to the place her daughter will be, after her death, by remembering her daughter’s anguish when the family dog died. “She will not come back!”, the child screamed. “I will never see her again!” Only now does she find it “almost impossible to write this”. But she does write herself into this unthinkable future. In doing so, she moves perhaps as far as any writer could into a place beyond words.

Sheena Joughin is writing a book about madness and women writers

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