Readers’ questions are in bold.

Where are you now?

In Norway, Stavanger, beautiful place.

How was writing in the lockdown the novel?

Are you asking whether I wrote this novel during the lockdown? Well, I don’t know if anyone would be ever able to do that…and I can write fast but not that fast…you need time with pieces of writing or at least I do for them to mature before they can live their own lives…you know the first draft I sent to a publisher had a Hollywood happy ending. Without Mark’s illness. And it took me some time to understand Mark’s role in Katie’s life but also Katie’s role in Mark’s life. That kind of perspective-taking is not immediately possible when you are very close to your main character…so no, I have been working on this novel several years… I started writing it in Martin, shortly after my grandfather died. For those of you who follow my poetry you know I wrote quite a few poems about him…so I had the novel ready, the pandemic pushed me to get the final edit done and release it.

And I am glad that I waited and didn’t release it some years back. I looked at the first draft the other day and Katie was so full of anger and denial. Now, with the distance of some time I understand it is part of the natural cycle but am glad that Katie, just like myself, reached the stage of gratefulness. It does not come automatically when you experience loss. And if you get such a stark warning at a young age, it focuses you. You become fully committed to life. Certainly for myself I have to say that it made me acutely aware of my priorities and goals, how I want to structure my day, who I want to be with. Maybe it made my poems too sentimental. That often happens when your mind is in an apocalyptic state.

Why did you decide to write about this topic?

If you take the view that we all have a story to tell and we all are artists which I think is the contemporary view of art, then I think it is interesting to ask why was a story written in a particular way. So I

Is this a memoir?

Well, they say that every novel is a memoir and every memoir is a novel… We often start writing with something that is very close to personal experience. We go through stages in writing and the first drafts were therapeutic. I think it’s good for authors to recognise and articulate the personal story, you know it inside-out so you don’t skimp on the detail. But then you need to move beyond that.

(Reaction to Thumbs up on the screen)

Ha, this is like the Facebook likes. Thumb up or down. You know I really think we need different mechanisms of appreciation for better communication between artists and audience. These social media sites are designed for exponential growth, for quantification of engagement. And you and I know, or I hope that you and I know, that appreciation is not expressed in numbers. Even a “like” has a qualitative value attached to it. It matters  who gives you the like, not just how many you got. Like when I got a “like” from my heroine Krista Tippett I was really touched. You cannot monetize likes just by looking at the quantitative markers…so yes, back to the question of why this topic, sorry for that tangent, but it’s actually related. Because if you are in a conversation with yourself and with others, you can bridge that distance between the personal and the public or the private and the shared. You realise that others have been through something similar and can better understand the uniqueness in your own experience. And it is in that combination that you start growing your practice as a poet (or any artist), I guess. That you start writing pieces that you can then release to the world and be detached from them. You know when you start with your first poem, like the ones I wrote for my parents, friends, boyfriends. You are so attached to those private poems. They harbour these intimate feelings, they are your direct extensions. That makes you vulnerable. If the recipient, the listener or reader disapproves of them, it can hurt you. But if you go through the process of internal and external journey, if you live a life as a collaborative art, then you don’t mind what others say or write about your poems.

Okay that was quite a long answer, will try to be quicker with other questions

Okay, two questions here

Is the book about you?

Ehm, no, the book is about Katie.

Have you ever been on a wheelchair?

Yes, I sat on a wheelchair. And yes, I had my dad pushing that wheelchair on a hospital yard.

How much research did you have to do for your novel and how did you go about it?

Sounds like we have some fellow writers here : -) You know being a scientist by background I am a bit allergic to the use of the term ‘research’ by artists because it’s not primary research so to speak, it is not the pursuit of objective reality, it is more like cherry-picking facts that suit your story. So in that sense of the word, I did some research about the extent to which people have been misdiagnosed with MS. You may have read the eye-opening book ‘Doing Harm’ by Maya Dusenbery, about the systemic problems in the healthcare system when it comes to diagnosing and treating women with rare and autoimmune illnesses.  So Dusenbery writes about how most medical studies are based on male body weight and their hormone system and how this sexism in medicine and healthcare can really harm women. So that helped me understand that Katie’s experience is not unique and that is why I only have male doctors in the book.

As for the illness itself, because of the personal experience, I didn’t need to do much research about MS. It was a conscious decision because I did not want to write a book with objective evidence or guidance on how to overcome MS. I did not want to jump on the bandwagon of blogging and advocacy. Or holding reading sessions where I talk about MS treatment options. I am not a doctor, I never studied medicine and it would be wrong and potentially harmful to assume that what worked for Katie, or me or you, could work for someone else. We are not there with the science or practical application yet, but I am a big believer in personalized holistic medicine, so I have always been very wary of programs that promise universal cures.

How did you learn to write in the genre of a novel?

Hmm…I do not feel I really learnt it. And if I did learn anything then it would be through reading. But then I read a lot of poetry so that is perhaps why this came out as a lyric book too. Also, I have to admit that I wasn’t sure about the form. In fact my first draft was written as a full prose. I was then revising it and editing and condensing the ideas and it came out like this. That’s probably not a very instructive answer…but you see I am not really into genre distinctions, I wasn’t sure where to place this novel. I know that Amazon and publishers like to know the market so to speak but I don’t even know whether this actually is just a Young Adult novel, maybe it is more like cross-over fiction? My publisher asked me of course who is your audience and I would say whoever finds the book interesting. I do not have it profiled like I am writing for this age category. I want a diverse audience. That’s who I write for.

But back to your question about learning the craftmanship of a new genre as it were, I would say to me the form is not entirely intuitive, of course form is about the expressive part of a thought, it needs to be shaped by audience expectations and tradition but I would say that the key distinction I personally perceive between poems and novels is in terms of time. Somewhat with novels I perceive a greater urgency to formulate the thoughts while they circulate in your head, those dialogues you need to tame on paper. Poems are much more patient creatures.

And I really don’t think I learnt the genre, quite the opposite if anything I made it clearer to everyone that I am at the very beginning of the journey and am willing to learn from others and with others. It’s a bit like learning a new language. The process is never finished. And you can feel very intimated at first to speak it even though you understand it. We know that the expressive language comes after the receptive language. So I was learning a lot through my reading and now started to talk. Whether I can actually be understood by others is an open question for me.

I liked the Andratalia world

Thank you, I am pleased to hear that. You know and maybe I should not say this but I did have an agent interested in this book and he asked me to remove the whole Andratalia section and keep it to the hospital bits only. He thought it was too jarring. The contrast. And I pondered the recommendation for a while and even had that version read by a few friends. But the feedback I got was that the novel made them cry and that they so much admire Katie and you know the one-sided kind of feedback you get for one-sided stories. I wanted you to have some laugh too. Because tragic or traumatic events do not erase laughter. I mean life is jarring, isn’t it? Full of paradoxes. So I want the cheesy parts to be mixed with the serious stuff. And I am fully aware that it would be a more digestible story if it was just about a Katie who gets the diagnosis and then overcomes it. But I feel no attraction to simplistic narratives. It’s like looking at a neat bunch of flowers in a vase. I don’t like cut flowers. I prefer flowers in the stone.

Can you say a bit more about editing

Okay, so I had no editorial team. I know many professional writers do and swear by it, I do that for my academic books. Here I did not want others to make suggestions for word choices or rephrasing what I wrote to make it more accessible. And definitely not have someone making suggestions for changes of actual content. I wanted this book to be entirely mine. I am not that controlling with all my books but with this novel, I knew that there were some choices that I made and that an editor would pick up on and ask me to change. Like I chose to have the irregularity in chapters’ length. I wanted Katie not to remember the years exactly. To an editor it could be illogical, to me it was part of a fragmented memory Katie had in the hospital. To an editor it would repetition that Katie described her mother and Paul and others as deaf and shouting. I had it this way so that I can later add how Paul makes that microchip for silences. To me it was part of the acute awareness of sounds when you lie in the hospital bed for long. I did not feel like I want to be defending these choices. I had an editor at the very end who only did light-touch final proofreading for me.  I chose this process because as I said earlier, I am not afraid of mistakes. It helps me write a better sequel.  

So one question was about the bullocks in the audio version of the book and bullshit in the written book- so this is a by-product of US and UK versions of the audiobook and the paper book. Very glad you found the audio version by the way. I think Shelly did an amazing job with the recording, she couldn’t have come up with more voices really, it’s tough to do dialogues with so many different characters, she is just excellent.

what are the texting on the website- first of all I am glad you discovered it. And you are right, it is not in the book, which is why I call the material on the website “bonus” material. But I should clarify this really, maybe I should add it to the website that it is a transition to the continuation of the novel- as I am working on the sequel. I’ll make sure this is clearer on the website, thank you for the feedback. See this is how we get better.

Katie has no surname- No, she doesn’t and the reason the doctors refer to her as ‘Miss Kati’ while they have their credentials are surnames is of courses intentional.

And someone asked me about why I call it smooth revolution, well this was a direct inspiration from Edmund Burke, 18th century philosopher who wrote about beauty in objects. You know how the doctors objectify Katie’s ill body, and how she struggles to see it as beautiful. So well, Burke wrote about beauty being in smooth objects. And then in my novel there are of course the references by Paul to the smooth iPhone and other gadgets, so it somewhat came together like that.

Why publish the book during the pandemic and with this title?

Ha, I knew someone would ask about that. Because I agonised over it. The novel had actually various titles. Andratalia. Misdiagnosed. I then went for The Love Virus because I wanted the title to be more accessible. Andratalia might be difficult to pronounce for some, Misdiagnosed kind of excludes those who are just diagnosed so I thought the love virus is the most inclusive title. Because we all had it at least once in life. I mean the love virus. We all have been infected at least once, some people twice or three times, I don’t think ever more than that. Or at least not with the same intensity. It’s a common denominator, the experience of madly falling in love. And then the healing, if you like, the gradual return to your sanity. This is one of the oldest ideas in the human history, with countless variations on the theme. I think it is attributed to Plato or to the Ancient Greeks the statement that love is a serious mental disease …

So yeah, the title is The Love Virus…

How are you?

I am well

And how is Katie?

She is well. And I also wanted to say for the previous question that of course I saw the direct parallels…how Katie’s involuntary stay in the hospital and then isolation at home might correspond to many people’s experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. That obsession she had with finding a clean toilet, not knowing who to believe, love-hate relationship with technologies. How we learn to appreciate what we have through loss. To Katie it was the relationship with her body that she learnt to appreciate after it lost its main functionalities. Because all the choices we get as a consequence of diversity put enormous pressure on how we define ourselves. And for Katie to have that definition imposed on her by wheelchair-bound existence nearly broke her. She needed to understand that she needs to be healthy for herself and for others. And I guess that journey inwards that was her realisation that she does not belong to anyone. Neither to Mark nor to her own body. You know she is the woman of the world.

Thank you everyone.