The Shadow-Sister’s Solidarity

Cory Oldweiler reviews Norwegian author Linn Ullmann’s novel “Girl, 1983,” newly translated by Martin Aitken.

By Cory OldweilerJuly 23, 2025

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

LINN ULLMANN’S SEVENTH NOVEL, Jente, 1983 (2021), was a long time coming, according to its narrator and authorial avatar Karin, which is also Ullmann’s given name. A combination of trepidation and revulsion kept the lauded Norwegian author from writing this autobiographical tale of a 16-year-old who, in January 1983, flies from New York City to Paris, where a 44-year-old photographer she dubs K takes her picture for a magazine. Only through the psychological embodiment of that forgotten teenage self is Karin finally freed, or forced, to let the long-gestating story out. Four years after the novel’s publication in Norway, Girl, 1983 is now available in an English translation by Martin Aitken, who creates a restrained yet fraught atmosphere for a story that Karin sums up succinctly early on: “The story about the photograph makes me sick, it’s a shitty story.”

Post–Me Too, readers will likely have assumptions about where a shitty story involving a dramatic age gap, an isolating transatlantic journey, and the world of fashion photography will lead. And many of these assumptions will prove correct, but Ullmann’s probing tale is much more than the sum of its abusive or creepy particulars; it explores, among other ideas, the power struggle between forgetting and remembering (“How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences?”) and the line between fiction and nonfiction (“Some people said it was a mistake to call my last book a novel when it was based on real events”). Underneath it all are questions about the emotional legacy bequeathed by our parents, a topic with inescapable intrigue here because Ullmann is the daughter of two titans of world cinema, Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman—both of whom, generically referred to as “Mamma” and “my father,” play prominent, if secondary, roles in Girl, 1983. The author’s prior novel, 2015’s De urolige (translated as Unquiet in 2019), explicitly focused on family dynamics, and her publisher now indicates that these two recent titles are entries in “an ongoing trilogy, meditating on memory, rage and desire.”

Karin makes clear from the outset that Girl, 1983 is more about forgetfulness and “what may have happened” than it is about faithful memories. “The events I’m relating here, what happened before, during and after K took a photograph of me in Paris, are made up mostly of forgetting, just as the [human] body is composed mostly of water.” That forgetfulness is due partly to the passage of time, as nearly 40 years have elapsed since Karin was an uncertain teen who skipped school more often than she attended, and partly to how she passed that time when she was “fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and drank until [she] threw up or fell asleep” and then “woke in the morning and couldn’t remember where [she’d] been or what had happened the night before.” These lost memories are incarnated in Karin’s “shadow-sister,” who reappears in her life in the fall of 2019. “The girl who will not die” is not exactly a welcome presence for the author, who writes that “describing you is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do,” yet she still becomes a source of motivation. “And what do I want with her? I don’t know. […] To bury her, perhaps, or revive her, or something in between.”

Ultimately, the shadow-sister becomes a way for Karin to mentally dissociate enough to allow engagement: “Give her your gaze. Give her your fear, your awkwardness, your desire, your rage (which our mothers have told us to keep under wraps), your hope, your immaturity. Give it all to her, empty yourself entirely.” That subtle jab is part of a tenuous undercurrent running throughout the novel with respect to Karin’s—and, presumably, Ullmann’s—relationship to her mother, about whom she writes that “cautiously we keep each other’s company.”

Liv Ullmann and Bergman (the latter died in 2007) never married, although they maintained a relationship for many years during the late 1960s. Linn Ullmann was born in 1966 and, as with Karin in the novel, grew up moving between the United States and Norway, depending on where work took her famous mother. In the novel’s present day, roughly corresponding with the run-up to and first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mamma is with her partner in Massachusetts while Karin is in Norway. In conversations between the two, Mamma repeatedly reminds her daughter that she was against her going to Paris as a teenager. Similar objections also occur in the recreations of the events of 1983, as when Mamma initially forbids the Paris trip: “I won’t allow it. It’s one hundred per cent inappropriate.” And yet the two go shopping for new clothes for the journey, and perhaps most damningly, the trip somehow happens, with Mamma insisting that Karin call her at 10:00 p.m. every night from her room.

While Karin is much closer with her mother, she “scarcely thought about” her father. And yet, late in the novel, she reveals that it is he who planted the shadow-sister’s seed in her mind when he told her teenage self “something [she] rather wish[es] he hadn’t.” His message is surely well intentioned, but it’s an incredible example of a parent not quite understanding the difference between adults and adolescents: “Listen, my heart, you’ll survive, but you have a shadow-sister who won’t, who’s frightened and who’ll go to pieces if anyone so much as breathes on her. She needs you.” Karin had not told her father what happened in Paris, but she does damningly and resignedly speculate on his potential reaction: “I’ve no idea what he would have said if I’d told him. Probably not very much. It was a different time.”

Most of the novel’s first section is an attempt to reimagine or recreate the outline of life in that different time, starting with K discovering Karin in a New York City elevator and ending with them having sex in his Paris apartment. Ullmann does an incredible job approximating on paper the mental gymnastics of a kind of post-event processing, the endless cycle of reconsideration that can happen after an especially anxious encounter. Karin is also processing repressed trauma, but of the several incidents of sexual abuse and harassment that are recounted in Girl, 1983, including horrifying events surrounding her Catholic confirmation when she was 14 years old, her relationship with K is different because—at least in Karin’s mind—it was consensual, which is not to say that it is devoid of abusive moments or creepy power dynamics.

The specifics of Paris are laid out in the novel’s second section, which presents a seamy world of exploitation. After her plane lands, Karin dumps her things in a hotel room and is then whisked away to a “sumptuous apartment” in the seventh arrondissement that is full of teenage girls with “long legs” and old men eyeballing them. There is nothing for sustenance but gin and peanuts, which seems to be a kind of constant in this world, as at an earlier Christmas party at K’s in New York, there was “no dinner, just blue drinks and cocaine.” A makeup artist in Paris later reveals the truth about this circle to Karin: “They’re creating their own beautiful little world here, he says, voice barely audible, where cradle-snatching is perfectly fine.”

These scenes and characters are likely to prove irresistible to a certain type of forensic reader, as Ullmann is often extremely specific. About K, for example, we know that he worked for Vogue France when he discovered Karin in “the grand old building between West 56th Street and West 57th Street” and that he is still alive in late 2019, posting photos with his “thirty-years-younger wife on social media.” K is always attended to by Claude, who keeps “expensive watches” inside “a grubby overcoat.” The Paris apartment belongs to Z, an openly leering man with dyed blond hair in “bleached jeans, worn high above the hip and belted tightly at the waist.” Late in the novel, Z’s past catches up with him “when ten or so women accuse him of sexual abuse, rape and trafficking.” It says a lot, none of it good, about our society that these charges could apply to so many prominent figures.

Telling Karin’s story is only possible via a series of conversations—between her and her shadow-sister, between her and Mamma—that are all bolstered throughout the novel by the words of several women writers, including Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, and Jenny Offill, authors who have also mined their memories. “What I’m trying to say is that I think of these women, the living and the dead, as benevolent ghosts, do you see what I mean?” Karin turns to the work of these fellow writers when, in the period that precedes the writing of Girl, 1983, she falls into a depression that is “more alienating, and [feels] more perilous than previous depressions.” She starts losing weight and cuts off contact with nearly everyone in her life, crawling back into bed after her husband and daughter leave for work and school. Even before the pandemic arrives, the world around Karin is perpetually in conflict, affirmed by references to current events and the omnipresent threat of climate change, an area of passionate concern for Eva, Karin’s 16-year-old daughter.

The fact that Eva is the same age Karin was when she went to Paris is yet another reason that so much of what Ullmann is writing about relates to her parents and specifically “the idea of causality.” In addition to the never-explicit but ever-present questioning of Mamma’s culpability in the events of her lost childhood, Karin also wonders whether she inherited her father’s “depressions, anxiety and rage.” But the most painfully powerful moments in the novel come when Karin is openly wrestling with her complex feelings about desire. The shadow-sister tells Karin that she had wanted “to be the object, the centre, the focus of another’s desire. I don’t want to be alone.” And after having sex with K, Karin castigates herself “for being born with this desire,” epitomized by her recollection of a moment when she told him “Don’t stop.” Ullmann handles these incredibly sensitive emotions and considerations with a great deal of care, both for herself (via her fictional stand-in) and for her readers.

Karin is also afraid of what might be uncovered if she keeps digging into what happened to her in 1983, and even earlier. Pinpointing the cause of trauma may be a necessary step toward moving past it, but discovery doesn’t guarantee resolution. Karin’s brief flirtation with the modeling world and everyone in it ends after a deeply uncomfortable scene that sees her, despite being the victim, feeling ashamed of herself. Because of that event, her life further spirals out of short-term control as she stays out late and sabotages healthy relationships. The long-term damage is evident in the very existence of the novel. Reading Girl, 1983, it was hard not to think of women like Virginia Giuffre, whose death was recently reported in the news, and so many others whose lives were irreparably damaged at such a young age by their abusers. After many years, Ullmann seems to have found a forum for trying to fill in the lacunae of her past, though she is far from certain about the outcome: “I’m trying to bring them together in one body—the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don’t know if it can be done.”