COLUMN: Art in its Own Terms #4, "Girl, 1983" by Linn Ullmann

Dmitry Samarov on Linn Ullmann's new book, GIRL, 1983, about a high school girl's relationship with a middle-aged photographer

Six years ago, Linn Ullmann’s Unquiet came out in English. I wrote a review in which I praised her ability to seamlessly time-jump through her childhood memories and to make being the daughter of two world-famous people compelling in ways opposite to the typical celebrity tell-all. Now Ullmann is back with another book, Girl, 1983 (Norton, July 2025, translated by Martin Aitken), that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography and is even more consumed with the slippery nature of remembering and forgetting.

The inciting event that the book circles, elides, attempts to explain, and can’t ever seem to get over/past occurs when the sixteen-year-old Linn shares a Manhattan elevator with a forty-something French photographer. The chance meeting leads to an invitation to a fashion shoot in Paris and, predictably, a brief, probably coercive affair. There isn’t an era in which a sexual relationship between a forty-four year-old married man and sixteen-year-old high-schooler is “okay,” but in 1983 such a thing was not judged the way it is today. That gap, in many ways, is one of the main subjects of the book. Ullmann is not seeking redress or reprisal in a #METOO manner. She’s looking for a way to relate the girl she was to the woman she became.

She writes early on about the many years she avoided writing about this chapter of her life. She often lied to family and friends about how the book was coming along, hiding the debilitating bouts of depression and disassociation that incapacitated her during the hours she hoped to be writing. The photographer, who she calls K, is not the only ghost who haunts her. A lot of the book—which is broken up into asynchronous pieces—is addressed to an imaginary friend or sister who was a mainstay in Ullmann’s life up until the fateful year of 1983, but returns without warning, from time to time, to remind her that she’s not alone. For better and worse.

Though she never tells her father about what happened with K, he offers her his advice/assessment anyway:

Once, my father said something I rather wish he hadn’t. He said: 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.

He leaned towards me and said:

Some people survive, some people don’t.

Is she ascribing significance to her father’s insight after the fact or is he instinctively onto something despite being unaware of the particulars? I couldn’t say, but the book is full of anecdotes like this that stick in the memory and allow the reader to turn them over and over for meaning. The fact Ullmann’s father is Ingmar Bergman is a not insignificant detail, of course.

Her mother, the actress Liv Ullmann, is an ever-present character throughout. She forbids Linn to take the Paris trip, then helps her pack. She makes her daughter promise to call from her hotel at 10pm every night, but Linn never even makes it to the hotel. She ends up in K’s apartment, forgetting the name and address of the hotel. Lost in an unfamiliar city, with the address of the middle-aged photographer on a scrap of paper as her only contact. What happens in his apartment that night and the following nights feels inevitable but is described as out-of-body experiences. They are happening to Ullmann’s invisible twin, perhaps, who disappears soon after, taking the full details of this crucial, damaging episode with her.

The writer uses all the contemporary means at her disposal to retrace her teenage steps. Google Earth images, search-result rabbit holes, and interviews with loved ones together form a patchwork that fails to recreate or explain what happened. Ullmann often wonders what effect their brief encounter had on K but thinks better than to contact a now-eighty-something-year-old for whom this dalliance with a teenaged girl was likely commonplace. The danger of his completely forgetting her outweighs whatever value a confrontation might have had.

Ullmann is not flippant or dismissive of the impact that being taken advantage of as a young girl has had, but she stresses throughout what an unstable, moving target even the worst past experiences can be. She observes her own daughter at the same age as the focal event of the book and fights the impulse to burden the girl with scared-straight stories. She knows Eva can’t be saved from making her own mistakes, just as Liv couldn’t save her from making her own. The controlled remove with which she describes the gnarliest scenes only heightens their impact.

The photograph that is the pretext for K’s involvement in Ullmann’s life is reproduced on the cover of the book. It shows a pretty young girl giving a come-hither look, bearing her left shoulder in a way that’s overly sexual for her age. It’s not unusual for fashion images of the 80s. I wouldn’t give it a second thought had I not read a book about the circumstances that led to it being taken. It makes me wonder how many other images I scan mindlessly throughout a day are similarly fraught with backstory.

The power of Ullmann’s book is how it describes in clean, exacting prose the effects that an ordinary abuse of power can have on a life. The way it will echo backwards and forwards through decades, sounding off friends and family and colleagues, who may know bits and pieces or may be completely unaware and yet are affected by the event inadvertently nonetheless. Ullmann’s tireless efforts to retrace her steps and reconnect with the sixteen-year-old she once was cannot reach any conclusive resolution but the attempt can’t be easily dismissed. No matter how much she’s managed to forget the traces of wreckage are all over the place. The shadows come out of nowhere and must be reckoned with again and again.

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