Ninni Holmqvist: Are You Indispensable?

Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist's debut novel, The Unit, is the story of Dorrit Weger, who checks into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. In pleasant surroundings, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty --- single, childless and without jobs in progressive industries --- are sequestered for their final few years. Considered outsiders, they're expected to contribute themselves for drug and psychological testing and donate organs to people considered more worthy. Dorrit is well-treated and resigned to her fate until she meets a man inside the Unit, falls in love...and breaks the rules.

Today's guest blogger, Ninni talks about the personal circumstances that compelled her to write The Unit. Her thought-provoking post alone will inspire discussion!


I had recently turned 45 when I suddenly realized one day that I was completely dispensable. That if I died, a number of people would actually be sad and would miss me --- because I do have friends, and siblings, and nephews and a mother – but nobody's everyday life would be changed. Nobody would set one place too many at the dinner table by mistake, or out of habit. Nobody would wonder: how am I going to manage now, who's going to take care of me, who's going to support me, who's going to console me when I'm sad? Nobody would wake up in the morning and sleepily reach out for my body beside them, just to be reminded once more that I will never again lie in that bed. And because of my profession, there wouldn't even be any work colleagues expecting me to turn up quarter of an hour late as usual, out of breath and gasping an apology --- only to remember that I wouldn't be turning up at all, that I would never turn up again. No head of Human Resources would need to find a replacement for me, or to advertise my job.

To put it briefly: I was suddenly aware of the fact that if I died, I wouldn't leave a tangible empty space behind me that needed to be filled with someone of equal importance in order for the wheels to keep on turning. Because I make no contribution to the turning of those wheels.

It is also pertinent that the Swedish word for dispensable, umbärlig, is rarely used. We prefer to talk about people, things, occurrences et cetera that are indispensable. Being indispensable is highly valued. If you are indispensable, people can't do without you. Someone or something stands or falls because of you. There is something exclusive about being indispensable.

But at the same time, it means that something is expected of you. You are expected to be everything to someone else, to be someone they cannot do without. You need to be needed in order to count, to be regarded as normal, to have a value in the eyes of other people and society. I think this is why the word for dispensable barely exists in everyday speech in Swedish; people don't want to know about a word that describes something they don't want to know about.

You might well think that this sudden realization of mine at the age of 45 made me feel really sorry for myself, perhaps I even became depressed. But my reaction was in fact the reverse; these words which exploded in my head like a bomb, "my God, I'm completely dispensable," had more of a liberating effect on me. They made me stop feeling sorry for myself, they lifted me out of a state of depression, which had its roots in the fact that I was childless and single, and in addition had a fairly low income. These words lifted me out of a darkness and a destructive questioning of the choices I had made in life --- all the things I had chosen not to pursue (family, professional training, financial security), all the things I had never got around to, and for which it was most likely too late (children) --- and into the light where I was able to see and to have an overview.

So thinking of myself as dispensable did not make me unhappy. To be fair, it didn't make me happy either. It was simply a dizzying and interesting fact, a fact I felt I needed to make use of. I decided to write about what it was like to be dispensable, about how it felt to be regarded as a selfish, spoilt oddball who makes no contribution to any kind of growth, who has no responsibility for any other person, who doesn’t know what real anxiety is and who can always take each day as it comes, without the need to think about anyone other than myself.

And I thought I would try and write about this so that the sorrow I carried within me also came through; I could hardly be the only one who felt like this. Sorrow over the fact that I never had children while I had the chance, sorrow over the lack of responsibility for another person, over the fact that I had only myself to think about and worry about, when I felt so strongly that I had the strength, the desire and the ability to be there for a small, growing person too.

So I took the word dispensable to my heart, and decided to use words to try to describe something people don't really want to know about.

It took a while after that before I actually began writing, because that's often the way it is, perhaps for all writers, but certainly for me: I go around with a word or a picture inside my head, knowing that I'm going to do something with it, but not quite what that will be. It takes time before a bombshell like that finds its shape, its story. The fact that The Unit became a dystopia is pure chance; it is also pure chance that it ended up dealing so much with the issue of organ donation. The fact that it became a political novel is also chance; it could just as easily have become what is known as confessional novel. And perhaps it can also be read in that way, as an expression of a childless, single woman's mid-life crisis.

Or perhaps the mid-life crises of childless, single women --- and men --- are political, at least as long as childless, single women and men have a lower status than others.

---Ninni Holmqvist