When my Icelandic grandmother, my amma, was in her early eighties, my mom accompanied her to a medical appointment. By then Amma had become hard of hearing and was grappling with Alzheimer’s. She didn’t catch the doctor’s words. “He says everything looks good, Margrét,” my mother repeated, almost shouting, so Amma could hear. “He says you’re going to live another twenty years!”
Amma paused for a beat, and my mom worried that she hadn’t understood. But gradually the corners of Amma’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Did you get it in writing?”
This was Amma: quick-witted, a touch mischievous, always perched at the kids’ table. She spent hours on end playing gas station and hide-and-seek with my brother and me, never tiring of chasing us along the wraparound porch. She watched Saved by the Bell with me after school; Zack Morris reminded her of my dad in his younger days. She let me tinker with her adding machine and her Royal Copenhagen porcelain figurines, while my brother waged war on the living room with green-and-brown plastic soldiers. She spoke English to us, except when she muttered Icelandic curses under her breath, or when she finished a phone call with her sister in Reykjavík and broke into fits of laughter, forgetting which language she was using.
When my postpartum fog began to lift, I found a renewed purpose for my writing: I wanted to craft a book my daughter could someday hold, even when we could no longer hold each other.
She died twenty years ago, in her eighties. She didn’t live to see who I would become, nor did she meet my daughter.
I began writing Freyja to honor Amma. Immersing myself in this novel, which unfolds in her homeland of Iceland and is informed by the stories she told me as a child, made me feel close to her. I tried to understand Iceland as she had known it—its poverty, its remoteness, its theatrical weather, its eerie quiet. I aimed to inhabit the landscape I first encountered as a child: the spray from a waterfall forcing my eyes shut, the lemony tang of sheep sorrel, my brother’s laughter as he ran across a lava field. In Iceland, I find Amma.
There has always been a kinship between us. My name mirrors hers. My appearance mirrors hers. The island she left at the edge of the Arctic Circle is the same island I returned to and now call home.
Yet the most uncanny resemblance lies in a stranger way: most of my memories of Amma overlap with the times when she was losing her memory. On a family trip to the Pacific Northwest, she wandered off in Seattle and we spent several panicked hours searching for her. One summer, I worried myself sick that she would forget to pick us up from soccer camp. As the Alzheimer’s progressed, she stopped speaking altogether.
In recent years, I’ve inherited drawers full of old letters Amma wrote from the United States to her sisters in Iceland. I cradle these lined pages, recognizing her rough handwriting from countless birthday cards and Tic-Tac-Toe games from my childhood. I hear the soft scrape of her thumb over the steering wheel at red lights; I see the steam curling from her black coffee at the diner with the row of table-side jukeboxes, where I would belt out Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” to my brother’s dismay and Amma’s delight.
I pore over these letters, looking for patterns, pieces of the puzzle that explain who she was before I knew her. She writes about money—how little she has. She writes about my father—the mischief he’s getting into. Thor is going to teach me to drive, she notes in one letter. I’ve already heard from my dad how that story ended: with one utterly frustrating afternoon in a nearby parking lot, after which he simply gave up.
I possess Amma’s papers, the envelopes she sealed, a time capsule of words she wrote. I glimpse memories that came before me, memories she would eventually forget. They remind me of her, yet they are not her.
The most pivotal night in my protagonist’s life—the moment her childhood best friend vanishes on a black-sand beach—leaves her with a skewed memory of what truly happened. My own traumas taught me how slippery memory can be—how fragile and prone to self-doubt it is. Yet as I wrote, I also kept Amma in my thoughts—how her mind gradually grew unknowable to her.
She clung to her sense of humor for as long as she could. At the rehearsal dinner for an Irish-Catholic wedding, she found herself seated next to the priest at the bar. “So, Father,” she famously quipped in her thick Icelandic accent, “vhat do you think, is He really up there?”
Many years later, not long after I discovered I was pregnant, I felt drawn to attend church. I sat alone at the end of a pew, hands resting on my belly. When the music began—a melody I didn’t recognize—I felt Amma beside me. Tears streamed down my cheeks. She wasn’t a presence, she was presence itself.
Amma wasn’t religious, and yet I was overcome with the certainty that she had come to me here, in a church on the soil of her birth and burial. The baby would be a girl, and her name would be Thorunn Margrét.
Fourteen years after Amma’s death, I went into labor. My daughter, Thorunn Margrét, was born the following night.
She is six now and often speaks of death. At bedtime, she once asked, “Mom, when I die, will you put me in a glass case like Snow White?”
Usually I measure my responses, but in that moment I followed my instinct. “If everything goes as it should, sweetheart, I’ll die before you.”
That was a long night.
Amma’s letters carry her worries about money and my father; my daughter’s toilet-paper-roll books carry her six-year-old syntax.
She wants me to confirm that her father will die before I do, because he’s older (by four months, I should note). She longs for a rule that could make the deepest mystery fit inside her small hands. And she wants that rule in writing.
When I ask what she wants to be when she grows up, she lists veterinarian (she means veterinarian, not a vegetarian), then singer, then writer. She ends with, “And I want my mom to live until she’s REALLY old.”
Motherhood shifted the course of my writing. In the early exploratory drafts, I sought to conjure the memory of Amma. But as the postpartum haze cleared, I wrote with a fresh aim: to craft a book my daughter could someday hold, even when we could no longer hold each other.
Around her sixth birthday, she began drafting “the story of her life.” Once upon a time, I was born, she begins. She cuts open toilet-paper rolls and stuffs inside tiny scraps of paper, spelling phonetically. Sometimes she leaves these mini volumes at our doorstep, hoping passersby will borrow them from her “library.”
Amma’s letters preserve her anxieties about money and my father; my daughter’s toilet-paper-roll books preserve her six-year-old syntax. Freyja preserves the Iceland I first encountered through Amma’s stories. I closed the acknowledgments with words I whisper to my daughter every night: I will never stop loving you.
These scribbles on paper are meaningful, yet in the moments you most need the person you love, they feel insufficient.
A few weeks ago, when my daughter lost her first tooth, she dictated a letter to the Tooth Fairy. In a postscript she wrote: Please leave the soul of the tooth behind with me. For a day and a half she carried the tooth like a talisman, reluctant to part with it. She also asked the Tooth Fairy to draw a portrait of what she looks like.
Now she has several more loose teeth. Next time, she wants to ask the Tooth Fairy to take the soul and leave the tooth. “I just really miss my tooth,” she tells me with a slight lisp, the tip of her tongue catching on the gap.
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Freyja, a novel by Margrét Ann Thors, is available from Spiegel & Grau.
