Maren Skolem - Selected Title Author
We are happy to present our selected title author Maren Skolem. She has written The Doors are Closing (original title: Dørene lukkes). The book is one of NORLA’s Selected Titles of the autumn 2024.
What is your book about?
Freya is a 34-year-old bartender who is struggling with OCD – and with hope. She is driven by her obsessions to check almost everything: if her doors are locked and the oven is switched off, if she has tick bites, or cancer, or if her mobile phone is live streaming her having sex. She is driven by hope to check Tinder: if there is anyone out there who might be able to love her, someone who might give her a reason for living. Being single, childless and thirty-something in a society of couples means feeling left out. So although her anxiety – which she has named Clippy, after the annoying little paper clip in Microsoft Word – tries to give her as little room for manoeuvre as possible, to keep her safe, Freya herself attempts to occupy more space in her life, to make it worth living, not just survive. And preferably quite fast; when she was young she had all these options, but with OCD it’s hard to make decisions, and while she is too busy overthinking to commit to anything or anyone, time slips away, and the doors that used to be open to her, are closing.
What inspired you to write this book?
I find OCD to be a fascinating disorder: the way you can know, rationally, that your compulsions are irrational, and yet feel so strongly about them needing to be done that you do them anyway. This duality has on several occasions made me think:
this would be funny if it wasn’t so terrible. That intersection between humour and seriousness is precisely what I like to depict.
My perception of OCD is of a struggle between reason and emotions, between freedom and control. You live in an extremely binary and dangerous reality, where you continually want to assure yourself that you are safe. I would combine OCD specifically with dating, because falling in love is also a form of obsession, where your emotions can get the better of you, and where you cannot have all the control. Dating is also an activity which is full of both hope and anxiety; two powerful opposites that quickly raise the stakes for the character and make her easy to relate to, even for people who don’t have OCD.
Read more
See full presentation of the book here
Read more about the author here
See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the autumn 2024 here
