Kjersti Skomsvold writes what she calls a ‘belated love-letter’ to Amalie Skram, belated because she fell in love with her writing when working on her first novel (The faster I walk the smaller I am) published in 2009. She has since published three more books. Monsterhuman from 2012 is also now being translated into English (and other languages). Skram is like a huge pine tree in the woods, she finds, unruffled by storms, while Skomsvold herself felt like a scraggly bush, finding support in Skram’s language while attempting to complete her own book.

Skomsvold several times repeats the feeling that Skram is a predecessor. As a woman writer, Skram faced the sceptics; the readers and critics that were shocked at her daring descriptions, and who at the same time tried to lessen her importance by placing her in the genre of ‘ladies’ stories’. Skomsvold thanks Skram for her braveness in writing about female emotions.

Also, as an author who writes about mental instabilities, Skram has gone before her, written novels about a female artist struggling to create while suffering from sleeplessness, and being declared insane and submitted (Else Kant in Professor Hieronimus 1895, succeeded by Paa St Jørgen). Skram has literally stared into the abyss, and Skomsvold feels safer for it. Skram’s fiction reminds Skomsvold not so much of the author’s life, as of her own. Her second novel Monsterhuman is, indeed, about a woman trying to write as a cure while coping with the disabling effects of years suffering from the ME-syndrome. It is a meta-novel about how she came to write the first book, and while the opus primus is a thin little book of 124 pages, the book about writing it, the portrait of the artist, runs to 580 pages. The intricate connections between work and author are there also in Skram’s work, but writing it is also evidence of the huge interest in confessional literature these days (to wit Karl Ove Knausgård).

Both Skram and Skomsvold probably felt that they are writing to keep sane: ‘the novels are necessary writing, and it seems to me that it is the writing itself that keeps the narrator from madness’.

In spite of the darkness of Skram’s novels, they also serve to remind Skomsvold of the good things in life: ‘it is only when you love life that you are disturbed at its miseries’. She feels that there is a special bond between the two of them, since her parents read The Hellemyr People  aloud to each other, and thus to her, when she was still an unborn child. An odd choice, perhaps, but it has made her not only aware of the sadness of life, but also of its potentialities.