BookBrowse Reviews Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann

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A devastating dissection of trauma from one of Norway's most acclaimed writers.

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On a winter's night in 1983, a 16-year-old girl is lost on the streets of Paris. She's been in the city for less than 24 hours and can't remember the name of her hotel; she's alone and scared. All she has in her pocket is the address of "K," the forty-something fashion photographer who's lured her to the French capital with a promise to get her picture in Vogue. She wants to go home—back to New York, back to her mother, who pleaded with her not to come. But it's after midnight and snow is piling up on the sidewalk: what other choice does she have? She makes her way to K's place, suspecting what might be in store.

A reader can't be sure how much of this actually happened to Linn Ullmann, author of the gut-wrenching and excellent Girl, 1983. The book is categorized as fiction, and a disclaimer stresses that "none [of it] should be understood as a literal depiction of any person, event, or incident," but it has been widely regarded as being autobiographical. The daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman, two of the most important European cultural figures of the 20^th century (see Beyond the Book), Linn Ullmann has clearly learned from having "parents [who] have made a point of turning their lives into stories," as she remarks in Unquiet, her previous novel. Ullmann's fiction mines the same depths of interior life as that of Annie Ernaux and fellow Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, taking personal experience and crafting from it a work that operates in the shadow space between the real and the imagined. The result is masterful: a book teeming with ghosts, steeped in trauma, with the knock-out power of eyewitness testimony.

Mostly split between the events in Paris and the crushing depression they lead to 40 years later, the narrative outline of Girl, 1983 is sadly familiar in the post-MeToo age. Ullmann's narrator is "discovered" in an elevator in New York; at K's urging, she skips school to get on a plane and meet him in Paris for a shoot. Reading her account of the world she finds there, it's astounding that it could ever pass itself off as one of romance and glamour. The fashion scene seems populated by little more than middle-aged predators and the enablers who know how to look the other way; the only goal of its leading "artists" is ensuring that they have a steady supply of schoolgirls to belittle, abuse, and ply with "blue drinks and cocaine." It's a pitiless world, where the natural competition between would-be models leaves no room for even a hint of sorority. "Stupid little girl," one of the narrator's new Parisian "friends" tells her after she's molested on a dancefloor by two strangers, "if you can't handle people touching you, you shouldn't be here."

It's phrases like this that seem to haunt Ullmann, resurfacing again and again in the narrative like the pain from an old wound. Hers is a fragmented and staccato style, flitting from past to present, shuddering around the black hole that is her brief encounter with K. How else to approach a memory so grotesque? When it can't be avoided any longer, however, she doesn't shy away, describing it with almost unbearable clarity—tangled in his sheets, she's nothing but a "big, motionless child who's not reciprocating." These sobering descriptions dispel once and for all the obscene romantic fantasy the photographer has dreamt up for the pair.

Girl, 1983 is the second installment of what Ullmann plans to be a trilogy "meditating on memory, rage and desire," an organizing principal which is more emotional than chronological. The first volume, Unquiet, focused on her relationship with her father as he neared death; in its second, the world-famous director is all but absent. But whatever the subject, any future work with the same depth and intensity can only be good news.

This review first ran in the July 30, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.