Alex Schulman: "It's a Scarecrow" – Culture & Fun



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Would he have left the story of his own anger or not? Two weeks before the book was published, Alex Schulman was stubborn. Was there no risk that the essence of the book – that of the love story between his grandmother Karin Stolpe and Olof Lagercrantz – was eclipsed by himself?

I felt very strong that it was not really my story. When I start a book like I did, he is still very egocentric, he says with a sigh.

Forbidden relationship

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Alex Schulman went to see a therapist specialized in the side to overcome his own low-level anger. Today, he thinks he has the tools to manage it. "Before I could fall without a hand, I did not start screaming and banging on a door, I just went down to a dark place, not to be a cool person for a while. I can usually miss this, "he says.

As a writer, Alex Schulman was founded in the autobiographical. In books such as "Hurry to Love" and "Forget Me" (about Mommy Lisette Schulman), he uses himself as a means of reflecting the one he is writing about. Here, he did not really want to write a "jagic" book, but decided after many anxieties to start and finish the book with the search for the origin of his own anger. This is after all that led to the laziness of the forbidden relationship between Karin and Olof.

Is he an angry person? Alex Schulman has never really considered himself so. By writing eventually, on blogs and in chronicles where controversy and confrontation have been a kind of work tool, but not as an individual.

I never receive any explosion, I do not scream, I never raise the voice at all. I never get violent, I do not kill anyone, nobody pushes, I'm afraid of it all. But maybe people are still scared of me because I have some sort of … what to say? Passive aggressiveness of low intensity almost.

Low intensity anger

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"I was very happy to have taken a step back.I was a little worried about having suffered a narcissistic injury that allowed me to describe myself well, but that I should never be able to find anyone else, "says Alex Schulman in" Burn All My Letters ".

Alex Schulman looks after what has finally helped him with a therapist. Anger of low intensity, or perhaps rather constant discomfort, while his closest friend reacted negatively. Where does it come from? When the therapist asks him to draw a family card and talk about his family, the pattern becomes clear: the family's daring, conflicting and chaotic relationships radiate in one and the same place. Grandfather Sven Stolpe, famous writer, Polemic feared, In The Private often Colonel.

He is a plague, says Alex Schulman, completely ironic.

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Alex Schulman sees in the book "Burn All My Letters" a kind of restoration for his grandmother Karin Stolpe, who has lived in the shadow of her husband Sven Stolpe almost all her life. "Grandma has a new depth for me, her grief is bottomless in one way or another," he says.

As part of his efforts to understand himself, he begins to read his grandfather's production, 94 books written between 1929 and 1990, and looks for the keys to his infamous anger. Very quickly, he discovers that a year goes back to the autobiographical writing of Stolpe, 1932, the year when "life died out", the year when he "lost confidence in man". Why? Because he was subjected to "sexual assault".

It's so sick, so typical Sven Stolpe to express it as well. I then understood that he had described this sexual assault, in a new form, book after book. And that all these women as he describes it, it's the grandmother.

The sworn enemy

In his grandfather's archive, where thousands of archived letters are crushed with puzzles, photos and reviews, he finds cryptic notes about the Olympics – a person that Alex Schulman's expects to ultimately be Olof Lagercrantz, the Sworn Enemy Enemy of his grandfather. And when, after further research, he approaches the Lagercrantz family, the picture is confirmed. In the diary and the preserved letters of Olof Lagercrantz, it is clear that Olof and Karin Stolpe, in the summer of 1932, had a passionate love story.

When I receive permission from 97-year-old Martina Lagercrantz to publish these texts, I understand that I am sitting on a document that I will never find again. I never have the same opportunity to write a story as strong as this one.

Why did Karin Stolpe always stay in Sven's life? Without spoiling, we can say that anger plays a decisive role in the decision. Where Alexander Schulman's sympathy is not hard to guess, he sees the book as a kind of restoration for his grandmother.

My grandfather thwarted his grandmother's life, destroying every opportunity for her to be happy. He is not only guilty of ruining his own life, but he has many lives on his conscience.

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