"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (24 page)

THE MILLENNIUM
Trilogy is not just a good story made up by a good author of good crime novels. These books talk about the need to fight to defend one’s ideals, and the refusal to give up, to sell oneself, or to grovel before someone powerful. The novels speak of values, justice, of journalism in the noble sense of the word, of the integrity
and efficiency some people bring to their jobs, including the police. The novels talk about morality, too. The virtual reality that has overtaken Stieg today has cast him as the hero of the trilogy. Well, Stieg didn’t wait for the
Millennium
books to be what he was. And in that reductive vision of Stieg, certain people have even tried to erase me from the map—along with our thirty-two years together! Unfortunately, this attitude is fueled in part by misogyny, and not just toward me: wherever the myth of Stieg Larsson is involved, women are always devalued, whereas he collaborated mostly with women all his life. In April 2007, my sister told me she’d just noticed that someone had changed the Wikipedia entry on Stieg: ever since November 18, 2006, the site now said that he had never lived with his grandparents, but always with his mother and father! And where the text had previously said that Eva Gabrielsson was his lifelong partner at the time of his death, now it read: “with whom he was living periodically at the time of his death.” The link with my interview on the problems with his estate, which had appeared in
Attention
, an economic journal, had also been removed.

SOMEWHERE AROUND
2006, the foreign media began to take an interest in the man behind
The Millennium Trilogy
, at first in the Scandinavian countries, then in Europe. Now members of the media from the United States and
Australia come to Stockholm to talk to me about Stieg. They assume—correctly—that I must be the person with the most interesting things to say, after three decades of life with him.

THE JOURNALISTS
invariably ask the same questions, in the same order. The first one comes out like clockwork: Does everything shown in the trilogy (corruption, abuses of power, discrimination and violence against women, etc.) really exist in Sweden?

When I reply that most of the facts, events, and characters are real, the journalists are astounded. It’s strange that Sweden always seems like a model to many other nations, when here we have the same problems found everywhere else. These interviews show me that the trilogy has taken some of the luster off Sweden’s image as a progressive and egalitarian model for human rights.

The second question is rooted in the journalists’ astonishment that I am not considered Stieg’s widow after all those years spent together. How can our country allow such a situation to exist? A good question.

The Millennium Trilogy
is today one of the most important Swedish exports, with—I repeat—more than forty million copies sold worldwide. But the trilogy is more than a few books: it’s a phenomenon that has had two major effects. The first is to have allowed a new image of Sweden to spread all over the globe. The second is that Stieg and the
trilogy have become a kind of merchandise that can be endlessly commercialized.

THAT IS
why I asked to be put in charge of Stieg’s literary estate. Every offer made by my lawyers since 2006 has reflected that wish. Every offer has left the Larssons free to choose the percentage of royalties assigned to me in payment for such work, which would thus allow them to remain the beneficiaries of most of the revenues. A long silence would always follow each of our offers … until their NO arrived. My lawyer, Sara Pers-Krause, summed things up for the Swedish media in November 2009: “We would like to emphasize that the important thing for us is the management of Stieg Larsson’s intellectual property and that we have, to this end, presented different requests since the spring of 2006 without ever receiving a single reply to any of our offers.”

AFTER FEBRUARY
2009 and all through the summer, the newspapers played up the negotiations between Yellow Bird and Sony’s production company in Hollywood over an American adaptation of
The Millennium Trilogy
. Familiar with the moral values of the United States and knowing that, unlike Sweden, twelve American states have laws guaranteeing the inheritance rights of common-law wives, I was curious to see what would happen. I was not disappointed.

ON OCTOBER
25, 2009, the Swedish evening paper
Aftonbladet
called me to discuss an article that would appear on the 26th in the daily
Dagens Nyheter
. Did I have any comment to make regarding the 2 million kronor (about $300,000) the Larssons would be paying me? I replied that I didn’t know anything about that, and neither did my lawyer. And nothing was published.

One week later, on November 2, the rival daily
Svenska Dagbladet
explained in its columns that the Larssons were now offering me 20 million kronor (almost $3 million). All I could say was that once again, my lawyer and I had been left out of that loop.

That same day, my lawyer called the Larssons’ new lawyer to state clearly that a newspaper article could not be considered a serious offer, and that we expected something more formal. This news made the rounds of the foreign media.

One month later,
Variety
reported in America that “the deal hasn’t closed yet; it’s been gestating for six months because of a rights dispute between Larsson’s parents and his longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson.”

IT WAS
at this point that discussion of the management of Stieg’s literary estate resumed among the Larssons, our lawyers, and me.

In the course of these negotiations, the Larssons offered me a seat on the board of their company, which administers the revenues generated by
The Millennium Trilogy
. This position would have given me access to contracts and financial reports without allowing me any control over how the trilogy and Stieg’s political writings were used. His intellectual property could be sold, rewritten, changed—and my role would have been that of a simple consultant, heeded or ignored at will by the two owners of the company.

In April 2010, my lawyer offered a compromise: I would have the right to manage “the other texts,” meaning everything but
The Millennium Trilogy
. And we waited for an answer.