October Child

A fight against the dark

From 2013 to 2017, Linda Boström Knausgård was periodically interned in a psychiatric ward where she was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. As the treatments at this "factory" progressed, the writer's memories began to disappear. What good is a writer without her memory? This book, based on the author's experiences, is an eloquent and profound attempt to hold on to the past, to create a story, to make sense, and to keep alive ties to family, friends, and even oneself. Moments from childhood, youth, marriage, parenting, and divorce flicker across the pages of October Child. This is the story of one woman's struggle against mental illness and isolation. It is a raw testimony of how writing can preserve and heal.

"Linda Boström Knausgård writes with her usual linguistic momentum, there's a kind of inviting energy in her voice. She balances her desperation with poetic precision and makes the urgency real for the reader."
Svenska Dagbladet

"October Child is a bold book, not in its openness but in its aloofness, in its faithfulness to literature and language rather than to reason and science. Against the great story of psychiatry with its simple, ready-made answers, Boström Knausgård insists on the irrationality in humans and on the suffering of each individual."
Gothenburg Post