“Have you ever confused a dream with life?”
So begins the cult classic Girl, Interrupted, a film adapted from Susanna Kaysen’s runaway hit memoir and starring Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder as patients confronting the vicissitudes of mental health and illness in a women’s long term psychiatric ward. This allusion to unreality and the shifting sands of living with psychiatric diagnoses is not new among films and literature centering on mental health, yet the image takes on fresh subtlety and unexpected tranquility—even within the occasional violence—in Danish writer Fine Gråbøl’s debut novel What Kingdom (Archipelago, 2024).
The novel’s English title will be familiar to anyone who’s familiar with either the book or film. It comes from another anguished, unanswerable question quoted by Vanessa Redgrave’s head psychiatrist character in Girl, Interrupted, which in turn is a line spoken by the hero Hercules in Seneca’s tragedy, Hercules Furens, as he reemerges from an episode of madness: “What world is this…What kingdom.” The unnamed narrator of this story and the other residents that make up her motley friend group have a fondness for Girl, Interrupted (“the way I remember it we hardly watched anything else.”), and the anguish of the question echoes throughout the novel as the narrator, a temporary resident in a psychiatric facility’s youth ward, makes her way through each day as best as she can. The despair, the contentment, playing the keyboard, committing self-harm, and quietly holding hands with other residents strikes familiar internal elements.
Yet the novel also turns outward, focusing on the external realities of living with profound mental health struggles, the hazy uncertainty of which must also contend with bald facts. The novel’s epigraph contains lyrics from the Tears for Fears’ song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and the narrator’s lived experience, equal parts disorienting, hard, and inescapable, seems to define the song’s pitiless first line, “Welcome to your life.”
It’s common for older films to be remade years later. That Gråbøl is doing so in a novel feels fresh. Originally published in Denmark in 2021 as Ungeenheden (or The Youth Unit), the twenty-something Gråbøl’s slim novel won the 2021 Bogforum Debutant Prize, awarded annually to an exceptional debut author in Danish literature at the country’s largest book fair in Copenhagen. Three years after its publication, it has now been rendered into English as What Kingdom by PEN America Translation Prize-winning translator Martin Aitken. If that’s not enough buzz, consider how rare it is for an international writer’s debut novel to appear in the United States not long after appearing in its homeland.
But this is far from a straight-up homage. The narrator and her daily life in the youth ward are unique to her world of European state-sponsored programs and fascination with American culture (50 Cent blares from a radio on the very first page). She shares the fifth floor with four other residents between the ages of 18 and 30: the Peruvian immigrant and karaoke aficionado Hector; the unhurried Marie, whose mother lives in the same facility, though she is not aware of it; Sara, her possessions overflowing her room even as she herself tries to take up as little space as possible; and meticulous Lasse, his room always kept dark; with Waheed, lover of rap and American food, and a permanent resident on the floor below, as their sixth member. At all times, support staff are on-site and equipped with all residents’ room keys, just in case.
The narrator had been living in the hospital before being placed in the youth unit: “I’ve got a good room here,” she writes, “I really think so. But the rooms on the fifth are only temporary…A practice home, I suppose you could call it.” The practicing—the supported meal planning, communal cooking, using public transport accompanied by a contact person, and social interactions both inside and outside of the facility—are all meant to build the young temporary residents’ skills and confidence for life on their own one day, but, according to the narrator, “[t]o all intents and purposes, such a life is inconceivable.” The rest of the facility houses older adults living in more fixed accommodations, and the two demographics rarely mix within their shared home.
Through clipped snapshots of her daily life in the care facility, the narrator explores the inescapable paradox of institutionalization being simultaneously constricting and necessary for healing. The notion of home itself is sometimes weighty, and often the narrator’s language takes on the distance and detachment of the official and legal, as if the best way she knows to describe her circumstances and surroundings is from what she has been told by her caregivers, psychiatrists, and contact person. “[I]t’s important for the young person to enter into communities with people their own age when they’re in need of such comprehensive social-psychiatric support,” she says, “often you’re the only one under fifty in various institutional contexts, which can lead to a feeling of restricted opportunities, a dizzying horizon, resignation.”
Later, in reference to the monthly floor meetings for the youth unit, she adds, ostensibly more in her own voice, “There’s a sense of security in knowing the next thirty minutes at least are going to be spent in this room with these smooth plates, these hard glasses, these formalities, I crave them.” The walls, furniture, other objects of her space, and even her own body bring their own noise to her consciousness, however—they support, infuriate, glare, promise.
Gråbøl, who previously published two collections of poetry (Manifestation, 2017, and Knoglemarv lavendel, 2018) has a lyrical sensibility that shines through What Kingdom‘s impressionistic vignettes and prose. Nuggets of beauty can be found everywhere: the narrator’s hair a “nervous bun,” the sun “fatigued,” the walls, an “audience,” a plum’s flavor: “anonymous.” Her body shifts ownership away from herself and back again; and she feels ashamed on behalf of her bones’ and organs’ forced association with her. Outside her room, too, the corridor is alive and “stretchy,” and even walking past another resident may require concentrated effort. “I try to walk as linearly as possible. I don’t like sideways movements, the same as I don’t like sudden emotional leaps, a car driving over a soccer ball in the street. My daily routines are crucial to my survival. Heart in heart, where are we going.”
Like Kaysen, Gråbøl’s own experiences inform this story, (though at the time of this writing, this comes from a publicity sheet where not much more information is given other than her claim that What Kingdom is not autofiction), but it’s the novel’s visceral quality that makes it a deeply affecting read. Though always briefly recounted, moments of intense emotion—such as the aftermath of suicide attempts, accounts of self-harm, and the immense upheaval that is the unexpected replacement of the narrator’s contact person—are woven in between scenes of shopping for candy and cigarettes, listening to Hector’s 80’s music karaoke sessions, cleaning, and band practice. Gråbøl’s writing, regardless of the scene she is depicting, maintains the same even-keeled tone. Nothing is sensationalized, but nor is it sanitized. While objects and scenery are regularly personified in dreamy exhaustive choruses, the narrative is at the same time all too real. What Gråbøl’s narrator subtly casts over with a critical eye are the economics and gendered aspects of mental healthcare:
We know what sort of diagnosis a person’s got even before they’ve mentioned it: boys are schizotypal, girls are borderline or obsessive-compulsive…The grammar of the ill is gendered, but also a matter of economics; the curable versus the chronic, benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles. Cash assistance subsidies, invalidity pensions, disability supplements. The fatalism of psychiatry.
These observations only darken as she comes to realize that her society’s go-to method of containment as a form of treatment offers little in the way of helping patients return to it. On a visit to a forensic psychiatric unit to see a former resident who is awaiting a court decision for threatening a pharmacist, she realizes that there is “no hope of improvement here, no difference between punishment and help, but adjustment, compliance, containment, containment, containment.”
This admixture of story and essayism has been popularized by some of her contemporaries, including Olga Ravn, with whom she’s been compared. Where Gråbøl breaks from them is orientation: a turn from navel-gazing toward social critique. In one of What Kingdom’s more affecting sections, the narrator critiques the language around mental illness, and the custom of referring to it as “invisible.” She counters, “[W]e see them just fine, they’re as plain as can be, articulated in our bodies, in our mortality rates…Is persistent physical exhaustion invisible?…Our wounds and scars, pink, purple, blue, crimson, are they invisible? Are our trembling hands, our trembling legs, our psychotic cramps, invisible?…Are our bewildered, ashen faces invisible?” Elsewhere, she wonders, “Could we not imagine treatments… involving the outside world gearing itself towards a wider and more comprehensive emotional spectrum? I don’t know.” Neither do I. And it’s that unknown that makes Gråbøl’s poetic investigation into these conditions incomparable to what was portrayed on screen in Girl, Interrupted—this is a cast without actors and more real for it.
