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Her mother, in turn, “watered a seed which had already been planted” with her seemingly inexplicable anxiety—her mother’s own fictions. “I was unable to reassure her of my innocence, present and future,” the narrator writes, “she wanted to get under my clothes and under my skin and into my head in order to read my mind to learn what triggered her unbearable fear, but as that was impossible, she invented her own version of me instead. Her fear created me because fear and imagination go together.” Her mother’s fear is half fear that her daughter will confirm something she already suspects, half fear that she will reveal to the world the unspeakable truth of this family. The mother’s invention of a fictional version of her daughter ultimately points the narrator toward the place where secrets have been buried and repressed.

It is hard to write about Hjorth without writing about Freud. She writes about him herself, repeatedly; Will and Testament contains a careful reading of Civilization and Its Discontents. And the story that book tells is a perfect psychoanalytic case study: a repressed childhood memory, a family romance, dreams calling out for analysis. Bergljot, the narrator, has always had a sense that something was wrong with her and with her family, and, as she grows older, she becomes increasingly alienated from her distant, tyrannical father and her anxious, jealous mother; but the exact nature of the problem is unclear to her until she begins having a series of “strange, painful attacks” while writing a one-act play. After one of these episodes, she goes back to look at what she’s written and finds it all there, her past comes back to her on the page: “He touched me like a doctor, he touched me like a father.” She quickly gets herself into four-times-a-week psychoanalysis. When she learns that her father wants to will the family’s two holiday cabins to her younger sisters, leaving out her and her brother—the two siblings who acknowledge a darkness in the family—she decides it is time for an accounting. Literally: She reads a speech about her father’s abuse at a meeting with the family’s accountant.

Hjorth, 66, is a prolific writer with some 20 books to her name, and she writes primarily in two modes. She is alternately a novelist of social problems, as in A House in Norway and Long Live the Post Horn! (2012), in which a depressed PR rep finds meaning through working for Norway’s postal union, and a writer of what Norwegians call “reality literature” and we call autofiction, as in Will and Testament, Is Mother Dead (2020), If Only (2001), and, most recently, Repetition. In her autofiction, her protagonists are writers or artists. They often live, like Hjorth, in Oslo, raised, like Hjorth, in respectable Norwegian families. They, like Hjorth, have strained familial relationships, and are often, like Hjorth, divorced, having realized that, contrary to familial expectations, they did not want to be “a middle-class, bourgeois woman, married to a middle-class, bourgeois man,” as Hjorth said of her own first marriage. They tend to leave these relationships for a more bohemian, more cultured partner, often a married professor, sometimes echoing the mother character’s own affair.