Tine Høeg in Conversation with Sussie Anie
To celebrate that Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg, translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra is longlisted for the 2024 DUBLIN Literary Award, we are delighted to share an interview with Tine Høeg by Sussie Anie. The two authors speak about how to write things that go unspoken, the power of the pause, and falling in love with someone else’s way of using language.
How did the process of imagining and writing Memorial, 29 June begin? What was your inspiration?
I never know very much before I start writing. It’s important for me to enter the text with openness and curiosity. With Memorial, 29 June, I began with a sense of longing and desire, and a place: a university halls of residence. I felt there’d be something intriguing about the contrast between youth – a fertile, blossoming, passionate time and state of mind – and death. And the halls would be the frame for those two elements. How exactly I didn’t know before I started to write. The first thing to appear was two voices: Asta’s and Mai’s.
How did your inspiration shift – or expand – through the process of writing?
It was some time before I discovered that the novel also needed a present-tense track, and that present and past had to be seamlessly entwined. So the idea that bears the novel along first showed up during the writing. I actually thought that I might be working on the text for two different books, but it came to me that they were the same narrative, and the pain was located in the relationship between the two.
The use of broken lines – cut in arresting and poignant ways – creates a sense of fragmentedness and, at times, disorientation, that gradually coheres with startling resonance. The precision of these line breaks infuses your writing with rhythm and intimacy – is that important for your writing in general, or more for this particular text?
I’m always preoccupied with rhythm and musicality, but I think that one thing that’s particular to this book is the way individual elements are allowed to stand alone and vibrate for a long time before they land and make sense – you don’t always know if it’s an observation or a bit of dialogue you’re reading, or who’s saying it, until you get farther down in the text and everything connects. In the same way, the relationship between the past and the present doesn’t fall fully into place until the end of the novel.
Who are your literary influences?
I always return to Judith Hermann when I want to read about unrequited love, and I read Helle Helle for the quasi-mathematical construction of her sentences. I’m also deeply fascinated by the work of Tarjei Vesaas. From my own generation of Danish writers, I love Olga Ravn and Cecilie Lind.
Reading Memorial, 29 June, I was also struck by the power of blank space to create rhythm and resonance – and infuse the novel with wit and playfulness. Spaces within the text seemed to contain stories in themselves, which added to the sense of loss but also created room for yearning and imagination. Can you share some of your thoughts behind the significance of blank space in Memorial, 29 June and in your writing more broadly?
The pause is utterly essential for me; I think of it as part of my vocabulary. Sonically, I use it as a sort of breath, something that creates a special rhythm. In Memorial, 29 June, it plays a particular role because all the things that aren’tsaid, and all the things that don’t happen, are critical to the narrative. The empty space can hold just as much content as the words, sometimes more. For instance, when someone asks, ‘you sleeping?’ and there’s no answer, the non-reply becomes itself a reply with a lot of complex significance. At the same time, I think there’s something interesting about writing that in some sense is only finished or only opens up in the head of a reader – when it meets the reader’s gaze.
Is your use of blank space instinctive, or does this come through editing?
A combination. When I first draft a scene, I’m already actively working with pauses, but there’s also a lot of very nerdy editorial work that comes later, in which I move the various elements of a given passage around, including pauses, and try out different connotations.
The fragility and tenderness of youth rings throughout this text, particularly through dialogue, in what is articulated and what is not, in speech as well as through text messages. Rendered through these exchanges, characters and spaces seem – in some ways – ephemeral, and digital ‘spaces’ more so: they stand out as living archives with their own literary dimensions and capacity for haunting. Can you share some of your thoughts behind the layering of these exchanges and your use of dialogue to create character and atmosphere?
I love writing dialogue, also ‘digital dialogue’, which plays just as large a role in how we communicate as spoken conversation, and which for all its ordinariness can be greatly poetic. In fact, it was through their written dialogues that Asta and Mai first manifested themselves for me when I started the novel. I let them talk for long passages, most of which didn’t make it into the final manuscript, but their digital chats were a way for me to get to know them. The energy in the Asta-and-August dialogues has a very different charge, a sexual charge. For me, infatuation is bound up with words and language; I often fall in love with somebody else’s way of using language, and it was a delight to be able to write that kind of infatuation into being.
Ambiguity permeates relationships throughout Memorial, 29th June – intimacy and closeness resist categorisation, and this adds to the sense of fluidity, and of haunting. Was it important to convey this feeling?
Ambivalence is essential to the narrative. There are two love stories – one between Asta and August, a story of desire and infatuation, and another between Asta and Mai, a story of friendship – and it’s impossible to successfully resolve them both at the same time. I love writing about what’s emotionally impossible, about longing and feeling torn, maybe because it’s part of being human.
Grief and desire stand out as contrasting – and timeless – themes in this novel. Your writing masterfully blends past and present, as well as grief and yearning, and through this motion and mixing, it has a quality of transcending time. Can you share some reflections on the role and place of time in your writing?
I’m preoccupied with time, also in the novel I’m working on now. I find time beautiful and scary and incomprehensible. In Memorial, 29 June, the timeframes lie atop each other transparently: we carry the people we were in the people we are. The past exists in the present, and it flows beneath Asta’s life as something unresolved – formally as well.
What are you working on at the moment?
Last year Sult [Hunger] was published, a book that’s fundamentally different from Memorial, 29 June. A diaristic novel about fertility treatment, a novel that’s far more impulsive, untamed and ungoverned, ugly and raw. The novel I’m working on now is at an embryonic stage, and as always when I start, I have very little to go on: a feeling in my chest and two scenes that I know are critical. That’s all I want to say for now, other than I’m looking forward to getting a novel to grow around it.
Translated by Misha Hoekstra
Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra, was published 2 February 2023. Purchase your copy here.
SUSSIE ANIE is a British-Ghanaian writer. Born in London in 1994, she writes about ideas of home in the transient and unsettled, and how technology reveals and distorts the human condition. Her debut novel To Fill A Yellow House was published by Orion and HarperCollins in 2022. It was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and won a Somerset Maugham Award.
TINE HØEG (b. 1985) is a Danish author. Her novel New Passengers, published by Lolli Editions in 2020, won an English PEN Award and Bogforum’s Debutantpris, the prize awarded each year for the best literary debut published in Denmark. Høeg’s own adaptation of the novel has been staged at the Royal Danish Theatre. She lives in Copenhagen.