12 minute read
I WILL DANCE AGAIN
THE HOUSE IN HVERAGERÐI Elísabet is already waiting for me as I pull into the parking space of her row house in Hveragerði.
As I enter her new home, I offer to take off my shoes. But Elísabet instead ushers me to her kitchen table and shows me her most recent acrylic paintings in lieu of an introduction. In colourful abstraction, they deal with isolation. Large blocks of colour stand fenced apart in tessellated rows, not unlike the development of row houses she now calls home.
Elísabet has recently moved here from Vesturbær, Reykjavík’s west side. The house she left there she had called home for some thirty years, or as she cosmically describes it, for one orbit of Saturn. She bought that house with the profits from one of her first ever works, Dans í lokuðu herbergi, a collection of poetry dealing with childhood, mythology, and, of course, dancing. This was also when she started her own publishing house, Viti menn, where she published most of her work. Having sold her first 500 books, she was able to get together a down payment. “I was always writing more and more so I could pay off my house,” she tells me.
The house in Vesturbær, with all of its memories, provides as succinct as any curriculum vitae of Elísabet’s life. As she puts it, “everything happened there. I wrote all my books, raised my children, I went insane, I got sober, I ran for president, and so on and on.” But Elísabet had to sell the house in Vesturbær in 2020 in favour of this one-story house in Hveragerði. For the past several years, her health has been declining, and she needs a living space better suited to her needs.
As she sits down on the sofa, she asks, “so, you’re here to talk about my kidneys?”
ON KIDNEYS AND OTHER MATTERS Like so many other writers, Elísabet has lived with mental health problems for much of her life. Since she was diagnosed with Bipolar I, she has taken lithium, one of the most common, and safe, mood stabilisers.
Prior to her lithium treatment, Elísabet struggled to maintain balance in her life. Her first son was taken away from her by the state, but when she became pregnant again at 26, she began to take treatment much more seriously. When she started attending therapy for bipolar disorder and taking lithium between 1999 and 2000, she noticed a change. “Before,” she says, “everything in my career was a mess. You see it in my books, how I started publishing a book every year. It was like a superpower.” Among the many works to emerge from this period are Vængjahurðin [The Winged Door], a collection of love poems, and Íslands þúsund tár [Iceland’s Thousand Tears], a drama written for the student theatre. Laufey also originates from this period. The titular character, Laufey, lives in the slums of Reykjavík, trying to care for her younger sister, who dies. It is also a love story, albeit one in which the beloved is also a rapist. These themes of love and abuse, care and neglect run through many of Elísabet’s works, and their narrative prevalence suggests a knowledge of these sides of life gained through experience.
However, in 2017, something began to change for Elísabet. She grew thirsty – incredibly thirsty – at night. Sometimes she simply couldn’t drink enough to slake her thirst and would wake up in the middle of the night to drink litres of juice and water. She was also tired, often needing to sleep 12 or more hours a day. Clearly, something was wrong.
Long-term exposure to lithium can cause damage to the kidneys and thyroid, and it is common practice in the medical field to perform blood tests regularly during lithium treatments. None of this was done for Elísabet, and she was never warned of the potential complications of lithium.
In fact, when she initially brought some of her symptoms before a doctor, she had even been told that the fatigue and thirst were in her head, a part of her bipolar disorder. Now, several years after the malpractice came to light, Elísabet’s kidneys function at 15%.
“I was very angry with the doctors. Of course, I hated them,” she says. “But I was so powerless, I didn’t have any tools. I was told I couldn’t do anything. The lawyers couldn’t do anything. I was shocked – everything crashed. I was hopeless, disappointed, angry. I thought I would die.”
Recently, however, things have begun to turn around for Elísabet. She has been placed on a waitlist in both Sweden and Iceland for a kidney, and she relishes the notion of having a Swedish aristocrat’s organ. Whether she knows the class of her future donor, or whether all Swedes are fatcats to her, I do not ask.
Previously an outsider to the academic-professional literary scene in Iceland, Elísabet's work has also been
increasingly recognised in recent years. Elísabet has been awarded both the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Icelandic Literary Prize for Women, and her most recent novel, Aprílsólarkuldi [Cold April Sun] was a well-received bestseller.
She has also recently found a lawyer who has helped her open a lawsuit for malpractice against the state. Elísabet, with the help of her new lawyer, has already won some money. But the battle isn’t over, and it’s unclear when exactly she can expect her life-saving donation.
SICKNESS AND HEALTH As one of the last true bohemians of Old Reykjavík, Elísabet has had quite a varied career. At various points in her life, Elísabet has worked in journalism, housekeeping, teaching, restaurants, and Kleppsspítali, the psychiatric department of Landsspítali.
Health, both mental and bodily, has played a central role in Elísabet’s life. “I was working in this clinic, but I felt so sorry for all the people,” she tells me. “I was reading the journals, and I found out that something had happened to them. Their way of thinking had changed. That was an awakening to me, how their feelings changed. How sad they were, extremely sad.”
Already when she was 21, Elísabet was animated by a deep concern for those around her. She tells me how when she worked at Kleppsspítali, she found out that the staff were served a better breakfast than the patients: “All they had was súrmjólk. I didn’t like that. I thought that maybe if we were better to each other, we could be more sane.”
She didn’t then dare to confront the hospital staff. “Not then,” she says. “I was so young.” One of her first published articles in a newspaper was about this small injustice. “Later, I wrote an article about this. So all the doctors, they would know that I know.”
TWO SELVES As a child, she tried to help her mother as much as possible. She would help with cooking and cleaning the house, and help to take care of her siblings Illugi and Hrafn. When she was doing everything she was supposed to, Elísabet felt like a hero. But there was another archetype she acted out as well – the bad girl, sometimes tormenting her siblings, seeking attention, causing trouble. These archetypes were not fully-fledged versions of Elísabet, and she often felt caught between them, suspended in anxiety. “There are no feelings in those roles,” she explains. “The anxiety, you hide it. There is no space for it.”
This anxiety, this gap between our two selves, has a name. For Elísabet, it is her inner critic, the nagging voice that always finds something wrong, that wonders if she’s good enough, if she writes well, if she’s beautiful enough.
Bipolar I, sometimes referred to as manic depression, is often characterised by long periods of lows interspersed with bouts of unusually elevated mood, irritability, and also
productivity. Her bipolar disorder emerged only later into her 20’s, but I find it striking how even from a young age, she felt this split, not between mania and depression, but these two childhood archetypes of hero and villain.
And yet, there is a way of looking at Elísbabet’s life that brings these sides of her together, the hero, the critic, and the bad girl.
In addition to her writing, Elísabet has also been an outspoken environmental activist. She famously opposed the Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam, a power plant in the Vatnajökull highlands that required some 440,000 acres of wilderness to be flooded to power an aluminium smelting facility. On a domestic flight over the area of the thenproposed dam, Elísabet seized the intercom system of the plane, delivering a speech on the damages caused by this megastructure in the wilderness.
Who stood up that day to briefly hijack the intercom? Was this the bad girl, acting out for attention? The critic, always looking for the negative in the world, the ugliness, the things that don’t add up? Or was it the hero, driven to sacrifice herself to care for those around her? In a sense, it was all of these.
As Elísabet has gotten older, she has learned to live with these characters. “Now I know about them,” she tells me. “I try to tame them. Most of the time, I try to be the hero and take care of everything. But the hero never shows her feelings, so I never cry. But I’m not so tough. I’m actually very sensitive.” KING BOREDOM Elísabet’s health has also meant that she has had to be especially careful during COVID. I ask whether isolation has been difficult for her, and how she has managed to deal with this great personal crisis alongside the pandemic. “I’m used to working alone,” she says. “I started to call people, I was checking up with friends all the time. My phone has always been busy these last years.”
Nevertheless, there has been boredom as well. “I never get bored. I’m never boring,” she explains. “But during COVID, I was almost dying of boredom. Still, I love my boredom. I get my finest ideas then. I call him King Boredom.”
Boredom and silence are an essential part of Elísabet’s creative process. Not wanting to sound too stuffy, I suggest that this is maybe something that is changing, that social
media and mass entertainment are taking away our ability to be bored. What do we lose when we are perpetually entertained? Elísabet muses about some of the ideas that have come to her in boredom, explaining how boring, terribly boring, it was to stand in front of audiences, reading from her books.
“Once, I set fire to my book as I read it. When I put fire to that book, that came to me out of boredom,” she says, as if it’s quite natural. “Standing there in front of everyone is so terribly boring, I came up with this idea to fight the boredom.”
Still, boredom and emptiness pose dangers for Elísabet, and she has learned to keep herself busy to ward off the darker side of things.
“I always have to take care of myself,” Elísabet says. “Because I know the mania and anxiety are always there, and they will take me if I’m not talking to people. If I’m not taking my medicine, not exercising.”
And yet, behind this lurking darkness lies a deep love of life: “I love life so much. I love the details in life so much. I love the everyday and the ordinary things and the higher meaning and everything.” She pauses, continuing: “I’m not responsible for this sickness, but I’m responsible for my cure.”
NEW AUDIENCES Elísabet has already published nearly 30 works, and been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, Polish, which have even Armenian. She is especially proud of this last translation, and we flip through the pages of her copy together, its alphabet as obscure to both of us as hieroglyphs.
Some authors, I imagine, feel rather dizzy at the thought of being so widely read and translated. Translation always involves some loss of control, and sometimes stories take on a life of their own, separate from the original text. Elísabet, after all, started her own publishing company to have more control over her books, and she talks fondly of going to the print shop to pick out paper, designing covers, and immersing herself not just in her literary work, but also in the materiality of it.
Elísabet, however, is giddy at the thought of being so widely read and isn’t too concerned about what her international readership may think, whether they have the “right” image of her or not. “I can’t control what image people will have of me,” she says. “I don’t know what image they have, and no one has told me yet!”
Despite everything, things are going well for Elísabet, and she feels that, except for her kidneys, she’s never been healthier.
Still, sometimes the mania and anxiety threaten to surface. She remembers one of her worst episodes: “I thought I was Mother Mary, I thought I could save the world. It was terrible. I danced naked in front of parliament.”
“Do you miss it at all, the dancing?” I ask.
“I think I will dance again when the time comes,” she says, and smiles .
Elísabet’s latest work, Saknaðarilmur, is being published this fall. Concerning the relationships between mothers and daughters, she calls it an exploration of bad memories, and the surprising ways in which we miss the bad as much as the good.
