Suzanne Brøgger

Author of 25 books, journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, and poet Suzanne Brøgger (b. 1944) has made a career of challenging western societal norms, especially with respect to gender, love and sex. Her 1973 book Deliver Us From Love has been translated into twenty languages. She is a member of the Danish Academy and a recipient of a lifelong grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Excerpt from the essay “Brothel” from Liberated, Selected Essays

It has taken many years for me to get a handle on my nature. And I haven’t achieved this completely yet. Once in a while I have some comical relapses, for example, having to restrain myself if a man happens to glance up at the ceiling and notices a little spider web – so I don’t dash out to the shed for a ladder to remove it.
But the Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski says that the greatest art is the art of defeating oneself. And that is what I am trying to do. Therefore sometimes I am quite a great artist. Because every time I am just on the verge of becoming completely natural, the devil gets into me, so the interface between what I am and what I am becoming, the interface between the unspeakable and the impossible, for one strange reason or other, flashes neon in my brain, and gives me blisters. Nor have I ever been able to take hopscotch seriously. Of course I don’t dare step on a line, I just can’t help myself; it’s a physical thing. Lay down a line, any old place along the middle of nowhere out in the horizon, a completely meaningless line, and I will definitely take my size nines and step on it. If I don’t I have difficulty breathing. Of course this is something very egoistic and individualistic. I can’t be along for the ride; I know this. But it is also one and the same thing that continually saves me from my nature – even though I naturally also have to thank reality, or more accurately, my incurable infatuation with it.