The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (75 page)

AR: What about time and place?

ST: We haven’t changed any locations, neither in the childhood nor present parts, but we have excluded some locations and compressed the flow of time – the robberies in the book take place over 14 months, but in reality it was 26 months.

AR: Did you find it hard writing about your childhood?

ST: On the contrary, the childhood aspect gave me the opportunity to participate in the story without being portrayed as one of the characters. My experiences, my presence, have been placed in my brothers’ bodies in the book, especially Felix, because in reality
I
am the one closest in
age to ‘Leo’ and hence I was often the one experiencing the things that Felix experiences in the book: it was
me
lying there on the floor watching my father and brother making Molotov cocktails to throw into the house in which my mother was hiding. So the situations in the childhood sections of the book are not less true; on the contrary, that conflict between father and son that I observed so clearly in reality is the truth inherent in the story’s resolution years later in that snowstorm.

AR: Which, for you, were the most important events we changed from what really happened?

ST: We never went in a completely different direction, but of course there are anomalies: how and why the smiley face was shot into the bank’s safety glass; Anneli’s involvement, because in reality, the person she is inspired by actually drove the getaway car on more occasions than the character in the novel; and most of all the bomb, both in terms of which bank robbery the bomb was a part of, and of Jasper setting it to deliberately explode, which was an accusation made in court but of which the robber in question was found not guilty.

AR: As you know, we did a lot of research, but how much also comes from your memory?

ST: At first, I tried to avoid written documentation as far as possible, and instead tried to recreate the situations, with you, based on my own emotional memories. But, of course, it’s impossible to solely do that if you want to achieve the best results, especially when working with another writer. We were eventually forced to dive into one of Sweden’s most extensive police investigations ever, including the preliminary investigations and the hearings with my family that I, up to the start of this writing process, had never read – and
that
had consequences. For quite some time afterwards I suffered from severe anxiety. I ran from the writing both literally and psychologically, but came back to it when we decided to shatter reality and rebuild it as fiction.

AR: What really happened to the robbers?

ST: They were all arrested and convicted with the harshest possible sentences
because of the nature of the crimes, a sentence that was unique at the time, bearing in mind they never killed anyone. In the hearings, it was made very clear I hadn’t been involved and in Swedish law one does not have to testify against one’s family. And my mother and I got a unique insight into the Swedish prison system after many, many visits to several different prisons over many years.

AR: How did your brothers react when they read the book?

ST: They’ve all reacted in their own ways. One of them (who inspired ‘Felix’) called me right after he finished reading the book and said, ‘Stefan, I hate you, but I love this fucking book you guys have written’, then he hung up the phone and ended our relationship – we haven’t spoken since. Another (who inspired ‘Vincent’) didn’t say a word after several readings of the book, but after the fifth he said in a low voice, ‘Now I understand what you’ve done; this is me back then, it’s me as a seventeen-year-old that you’ve portrayed, not the man I am today.’ Finally, my third brother (who inspired ‘Leo’) was deeply moved, and wrote a fantastic letter to me in which he explained how he now understands the madness to which he had exposed himself and those around him.