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Non-fiction
Editor:
Gyldendal
Translator:
Nina aspen
Release year:
2020
«Private, intimate and autonomous»
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In “The Year Thirteen Months”, journalist Åsa Linderborg opposes the Swedish metoo movement. But the book is so personal that one is not convinced that metoo is a threat to the rule of law.
Instead, the book appears as a dubious defense speech for its own journalistic abuse.
“The year of thirteen months” is very personal, private, and too intimate. It is written like a journal and takes us from May 2017 to the end of the summer of 2018. His account of this dramatic period begins when he takes a shower. There she washes off the sweat and semen after a night with her boyfriend.
With the opening, she presents her unhappy love story that ends when the man she loves leaves her. Deceived and shattered, she tries to put a new life on her feet.
There is no doubt that history leaves its mark. Linderborg closely describes his happy moments and the pain and loneliness after the breakup. It is easy to recognize in their descriptions of incipient old age, the idea of being alone and missed by the loved one. Still, I wish the historian and journalist had looked up. Then she could have consoled herself more with everyone around her. She still has contact with her two adult children, close friends, and family. Instead, she is buried in the memory of when her mother left her and her father when she was a child.
Criticize metoo
“The Year Thirteen Months” is not a continuation of Linderborg’s gripping description of growing up in “No one owns me.” First of all, it is an agreement with the metoo movement and a defense of his own articles and Aftonbladet. His chaotic private life and hectic professional life are even presented as the reason why he does not remember having written the metoo articles that have been criticized by the responses of the Swedes to the professional press committee. The fact that he uses his private life to criticize me makes the book self-absorbed in an extremely problematic way.
I was living in New York myself when it all started with posts about Harvey Weinstein. In the United States, the movement was understood as a women’s uprising after the harassment with Donald Trump’s locker room talk and the treatment of Hillary Clinton was officially accepted.
If we ignore a couple of visits to Norway, there is hardly a world in Linderborg’s book outside of Sweden and Stockholm’s cultural and media elite. The number of book launches, restaurant visits, and dinners the author participates in is impressive. But they are also a reason why you don’t see the magnitude of the uprising. The absence of considerations about the fact that metoo extends beyond the cases reported in the media is striking. That it has changed the professional life and the daily life of women does not seem to have surprised the author.
Shocking about a Sweden in metoo-intoxication
Media criticism
Another reason his criticisms are not convincing is that he understands the Swedish movement too much in light of Cissi Wahlin’s rape charge against his colleague Fredrik Virtanen.
It’s one thing that Aftonbladet had no idea how they would handle the case, but Linderborg is also criticizing the other newspapers for covering it. In this way, it transforms the entire metoo into a battle for circulation figures and clicks on the web in an increasingly fierce competition between media houses.
Unfortunately, the media perspective also characterizes his coverage of the Aftonbladet and Linderborg campaign against theater director Benny Fredriksson, who resigned and later took his own life.
Nor does the agreement with the Swedish Academy after Matilda Gustavsson’s crucial article in Dagens Nyheter make her broaden her perspective. When the rape verdict against Jean-Claude Arnaud and the verdict against Wahlin for defamation do not cause Linderborg to reconsider his claims about the weakened legal security of men, there is only one way to conclude:
“The Year of Thirteen Months” tells the story of a star journalist who lost touch with reality.
A mother from hell
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