"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (25 page)

IN MAY
2010, a book I’d written with Gunnar von Sydow was published:
Sambo: ensammare än du tror
(
Concubine: More Alone Than You Think
). In January 2008, I’d begun to wonder if my predicament might be more common than I thought: cohabitation without benefit of marriage is widespread in Sweden, so many people must have been in my position, and in the course of my research I naturally discovered many men and women who were my companions in misfortune. My coauthor and I found out something astonishing, however: our most solid arguing point—the significant number of couples involved—vanished in a flash! As it turns out, we are all only a
minority
for the government, since the National Swedish Institute of Statistics only counts couples
who have children together
. Everyone else is classified as “single.”
^*

SIX
weeks after our compromise offer was made, Joakim and Erland Larsson replied simultaneously, via a press release and an email to my lawyer, that they were breaking off negotiations with me.

FIAT JUSTITIA
, pereat mundus
. Let justice be done, though all the world perish.

EARLY IN
April 2009, my lawyer received an unexpected request from a former journalist, Jan M. Moberg (at the time the director general of the Norwegian media group Edda Media), and his lawyer.

Jan M. Moberg had just seen a rebroadcast of “The Millennium Millions,” a special report on Swedish television on how Stieg’s father and brother had come by his estate. During that program, the Larssons had mentioned that one of their ideas for “solving the problem” had been that I should marry Stieg’s father.

Jan M. Moberg and two of his friends, roused to indignation, wanted to launch a website—
www.supporteva.com
—that would bring me some moral and financial support.
Calling themselves the Three Musketeers of Drammen, they saw their creation of this site as an application of the same philosophy of action and justice that animates the trilogy. Their objective was to collect money and open an account for me on the Internet, administered by their lawyer in Norway. I was pleasantly surprised by their professionalism, and my lawyer gave me the go-ahead to accept their offer.

THESE NORWEGIANS
seem to have a particularly delightful sense of humor. The website, which was launched within three weeks and translated into several languages, invites Internauts to contribute a sum commensurate with the number of Stieg’s novels they have read and their degree of outrage over my predicament. On the Comments page, messages of encouragement come in from around the world, and I’ve received as many phone calls and emails from perfect strangers as I have from my own friends and acquaintances, all telling me that they were relieved to finally have a way to tell me publicly how they felt.

RIGHT BEFORE
the site went online, Erland and Joakim Larsson donated 4 million kronor (a little less than $600,000) to
Expo
, on top of a previous gift of 1 million kronor (not quite $150,000). This news prompted the Norwegians to contact
Expo
and
Searchlight
, the two
biggest antifascist magazines for which Stieg had written, to ask them to write about the site and publicize a link to it. The British magazine immediately allocated a large space on its website to this end.
Expo
, however, replied that my conflict with the Larssons was unfortunate, but that they couldn’t take sides in a private matter. The same point was raised by Norstedts, which declined to help.

ON MAY
25, 2009, Norstedts and the Larssons together awarded their first “Stieg Larsson Prize” of 200,000 kronor, almost $30,000, in memory of Stieg’s battles against injustice.

It was presented to
Expo
.

AS I’VE
already related, my sister Britt went with Erland to
Expo
’s office on the morning after Stieg’s death, and I asked her to take my partner’s backpack along with her. It contained his agenda, with booked lectures, meetings and deadlines, the detailed outline for the next issue, and the
Expo
laptop. This computer thus belongs to the magazine, but it also contains Stieg’s articles, his correspondence with
Searchlight
, his research, the names of his informants, etc. For this reason, the laptop is protected by the Swedish Constitution’s Freedom of the Press Act, which says that a journalist’s sources must be kept confidential. This computer, unprotected by any secret password, remained in the
Expo
office for more than six months. At the time, someone
suggested that it be put in the office safe, but the safe was locked and only Stieg knew the combination!

The laptop contains the fourth volume of the
Millennium
saga … perhaps.

This text is a little more than two hundred pages long, because when we went on vacation that last summer, Stieg had already written more than a hundred and sixty pages. Between going over the first volume a few times in the final editing, finishing the third one, and his work at
Expo
, Stieg probably didn’t have time in the weeks before his death to add more than fifty pages to the fourth volume.

I have no intention of summarizing here the plot of the fourth novel. I would like to say, however, that in this book Lisbeth Salander gradually breaks free of all of her ghosts and enemies. Every time she manages to take revenge on someone who has harmed her, physically or psychologically, she has the tattoo symbolizing that person removed. Lisbeth’s piercings are her way of following the fashion of others her age, but those tattoos are her war paint. To some extent, the young woman behaves like a native in an urban jungle, acting like an animal, relying on instinct, of course, but always on the alert as well for what may lie ahead, sniffing out danger. Like Lisbeth, I trust my instincts when I encounter new people and situations. As Stieg well knew.

In the space of two years, Stieg wrote two thousand pages of the trilogy, almost without notes or research (except for small details). How did he do it? Simple: the basic material for these books is our personal lives and our thirty-two years together. The trilogy is the fruit of Stieg’s experience, but of
mine as well. Rooted in Stieg’s childhood, but in mine, too. Rooted in our battles, our commitments, our trips, our passions, our fears.… These books are the jigsaw puzzle of our lives. That’s why I cannot tell exactly what part of
The Millennium Trilogy
comes from Stieg and what comes from me. What I
can
say is that if anyone ever decided to take up the challenge to continue the adventure, each book would require years of work.

The vicissitudes of life arranged for Stieg, not me, to bring all of those things together to create literature. Ironically, some people insist that I made no contribution whatsoever to the trilogy—while others claim that I wrote the whole thing. I can only say that just as Stieg and I shared a common language, we often wrote together.

In August 2005, Per-Erik Nilsson submitted an offer to the Larssons and to Norstedts in which he asked that I be given control of the moral rights to Stieg’s work. That way I would have been able to work legally on his texts and finish the fourth book, which I am capable of doing. My lawyer felt that this prospect would inspire the Larssons to find a solution to our impasse.

The Larssons said no.

It should be made clear here that nothing in Swedish inheritance law obliges anyone to inherit a legacy. No one is prevented from giving away all or part of an inheritance. The law also allows the moral rights to an author’s oeuvre to be transferred to someone else.