![]() ![]() She was not yet eighteen when her romance with the fifty-year-old married editor in chief resulted in pregnancy. Her instinct for storytelling-so evident to her teachers-landed young Lindgren a gig as a trainee journalist at a local paper. By 1924, at sixteen, she was dressing in slacks, jackets, ties, and caps and scissoring her blonde hair to boy length like the radical bachelorette in Victor Margueritte’s La garçonne (a mode Scandinavian male columnists scorned as the “Apache cut”). Lindgren was the eldest, dance-crazy daughter of farmers in a small town in southern Sweden. Lindgren writes in a letter to her best friend, “Suddenly, a person comes rushing up to you and says, ‘We’re kindred souls, we understand each other.’ And inside you hear a voice saying with painful clarity, ‘Like hell we do.’ ” “It’s almost the most important thing of all.” Even love can barely renegotiate the fact of everyone’s self-containment, when it can at all. “If they’ve never learned to be alone, people develop only weak and fragile defenses against the ways life decides to hurt them,” she said. Lindgren, as Andersen notes, believed that we ought to learn to be solo artists at every stage of life. In Jens Andersen’s biography, published this week in English by Yale University Press, Astrid Lindgren, the famed Swedish author of the Pippi Longstocking series, is a Walden-loving modern mind taken with loneliness. ![]()
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