Stieg and Me - Memories of a Life with Stieg Larsson
by Eva Gabrielsson
Orion Books
With genuine excitement replacing cynicism over the December release of the Hollywood adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, interest has been reignited in the life and times of the best-selling novelist Sweden has ever produced.
Because Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack at the age of 50 before he became a publishing sensation, he has remained something of an enigma. The picture of the man is partly filled in here by his girlfriend of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson, whose memoir is a fascinating yet frustrating read. One also feels it could have been longer.
Hers is a yarn that itself would make for a natural sub-plot in one of her late partner's novels. When Larsson's Millennium trilogy turned into a cash cow - further fattened by the film adaptations, and translations into dozens of languages - a bitter struggle began between Gabrielsson and Stieg's father and brother. Ignoring Gabrielsson and her needs - the couple had lived close to poverty for three decades - the Larssons seized total control of his estate and artistic ownership of the novels. Gabrielsson explains the irony, as there had been a long history of animosity between Stieg and the two beneficiaries.
Nevertheless, under Swedish law, the unmarried Gabrielsson had no legal grounds to inherit any of the estate, and the Larssons were apparently preventing her from seeing a single krona from her late partner's work. Her rage and sense of injustice are palpable in these pages.
Penned in a terse and unadorned style, Stieg & Me is as much Gabrielsson's case against the surviving Larssons as it is a memoir, which makes it all the more gripping. This legal battle has both enthralled and appalled Sweden, with very few neutral on the topic.