Linn Ullmann’s seventh book, Girl, 1983, was first published in Norway in 2021. It became that year’s bestselling novel, despite being released in late November, reflecting the excitement created by her previous novel, Unquiet, which focused on the narrator’s relationship with her father. Although billed as fiction and peopled with characters bearing only initials or descriptors, the central figure was clearly modelled on Ullmann’s father, the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. 

Unquiet fictionalised Ullmann’s upbringing in upstate New York, where she lived with her mother, the actor Liv Ullmann, and her career as a teenage fashion model, which led to an affair with an older magazine photographer in Paris. That relationship was glossed over in Unquiet, but it provides the central subject of Girl, 1983, which is billed as the second instalment in a ‘trilogy meditating on memory, rage and desire’.

The book moves between the narrator’s experiences in Paris and the present. She now lives in Oslo and has a teenage daughter. She finds herself wondering ‘if experiencing sixteen again, not as myself, but through another person, a child, a daughter, does something to one’s perspective’. Although she maintains that