Milja Sarkola
Min psykiater is a page-turner of a novel, a funny, tragic, and breathtaking journey between different dimensions of the narrator’s consciousness: observation, memory, longing, and bold projections.
“The second time I went to see my psychiatrist,” reads the first sentence. The narrator is a playwright, an almost 50-year-old mother of two, divorced from the children’s other mother, and in a relationship with lawyer Eeva. She feels her work is meaningless and has problems in her relationship, has been on sick leave for a while, and says: “I’d like to feel better. I don’t like myself.”
The narrator’s sessions with the psychiatrist form the backbone of the novel, but the majority of the action and most of the drama take place in her fantasies about him. Time and again, her thoughts leap from the consultation room into detailed imaginings of what he is like at home, what his wife is like, what they are like together, how they host dinner parties with their friends Toffe and Bettina. With delight, she envisions them discussing art and preparing sauce for a delicate reindeer steak while reflecting, with fitting self-irony or defensiveness, on their bourgeois lifestyle.
Between visits to the psychiatrist, she lives her regular life, spending time with her partner, whom she loves and hurts. She organises her own dinner parties for her friends Monica and Oliver, and the conversation about bourgeoisie versus authenticity echoes the imagined discussions at the psychiatrist’s dinner table, but more is at stake here – life, love, meaning.
Another theme is the narrator’s self-loathing, expressed as painful internalised homophobia, or doubts about the value and legitimacy of her own identity and desires. The novel is short but holds a great deal. It’s funny yet harrowing, open yet enigmatic. It masterfully shifts between sharp situational comedy, intellectual reflection and provocation, and moving cries for help: “I’d wanted to ask him if he understood the depth of my suffering, if he could glimpse even a sliver of salvation for me.”
Sarkola skilfully lets the different strands – observation, memory, fantasy – succeed and intertwine with each other. The readers believe they have control over what is what, but the question is how important that really is in the end. In literature – as in the therapy room and on the stage of the psyche – the criteria for truth differ from those in a courtroom or at a negotiation table.
Milja Sarkola (b. 1975) is a multi-award-winning playwright and director. She made her debut as a novelist in 2020 with Mitt kapital (not translated into English). Sarkola is bilingual and writes her books in both Finnish and Swedish.