When the Cranes Fly South
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Lisa Ridzén on When the Cranes Fly South
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A box of notebooks in her father’s workshedThe novel’s origin was not a writerly ambition but an accidental discovery. While her father rummaged for screws in his workshed, Ridzén opened a box of her late grandfather’s belongings and found the logbooks his home care team had kept during the final two or three years of his life. Reading through those entries, she felt the pull of a story no one had told her.
As I was reading through these little everyday notes, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I really need to write a book about an old person’s perspective on life, but also on aging and passing, I guess.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Her PhD fieldwork on masculinity in rural Jämtland had given her a second, parallel reason to write Bo into existence. Interviewing men in isolated northern communities, she found that the stoic cultural image she had grown up with told only half the story, and that the other half had almost no representation in Swedish fiction.
I’ve always been fascinated by masculinity and emotionality, right? How we communicate our feelings and how important that is for our well-being. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s emotional spine grew from a specific failure of speech she witnessed in her own family. Her grandfather could not bring himself to tell her father directly how proud he was of him, so she carried the message herself. The relief she saw on her father’s face fixed itself in her memory as the cost of silence, and it became the central frustration Bo, the novel’s elderly protagonist, spends the whole book trying to overcome.
My grandfather told me how proud he was of my father and how well he’d done in life and so on, but he couldn’t tell my father that. But of course I did, and it made my dad happy. But there’s something that makes certain feelings really hard to express.
How she wrote it
Ninety minutes a morning, before the baby wokeThe book’s writing schedule was set not by intention but by her daughter, who was born in May 2021. The only uninterrupted time available each morning was a ninety-minute sleep window between six and seven-thirty, and Ridzén used every minute of it. Most of the first draft was done in about four months.
I just sat down and I was Bo for one and a half hours, and then she woke up, and I took off and breastfed and left Bo. [paraphrased from audio]
Ridzén’s doctoral training in life-story interviewing carried directly into how she built Bo’s character. Rather than inventing from scratch, she worked the way she had in the field, using techniques learned from her research to draw out authentic detail from the people around her.
I call my dad, or my best friend, or some neighbors. And when I talk to the village people around me and so on, I use certain ways of doing interviews that I’ve learned through my research.
Hemtjänst, Sweden’s publicly funded home care system in which carers visit elderly people in their own homes, is so common in Swedish life that Ridzén felt its exclusion from the novel was impossible. She had worked in it herself, and the character Ingrid, Bo’s most attentive carer, is drawn from a real colleague. The logbook entries that punctuate the novel came from the actual notebooks she found in her father’s workshed.
If you write a book about an old man, or an old person, you kind of have to include this, if it’s set in Sweden, because basically everyone goes through it. [paraphrased from audio]
Her own body was a source material she hadn’t planned to use. A period of illness earlier in her life, during which she spent considerable time bedridden with rheumatism, gave her a precise physical memory to draw on when writing Bo’s declining body from the inside. The goal was not atmosphere but sensation.
I wanted the reader to really feel the physical sensation of being in a body that is slowly losing its strength. And just how much energy and ability is devoted to the simple act of moving.
The title was found by accident on a dog walk. For months the manuscript had carried a plain descriptive placeholder. One autumn evening at the wetland near her house, Ridzén watched cranes fly overhead, called out to her dog that they were heading south, and recognized immediately that the image fitted a story about a man in the autumn of his life. The placeholder was dropped.
[paraphrased from audio] The title came to her that evening, and she knew it was right.
That moment of accidental naming anchored something the plain working title had missed: the novel is not a study of decline but a migration, a last movement toward something the character cannot yet name.
The personal thread
Her grandfather’s house, his silence, his deathRidzén now lives in the same house where her grandfather died, and the closing image of the novel, Bo dying in the night with a single carer beside him, is not invented. The note she ended the book with matches what actually happened to her grandfather almost exactly.
My granddad passed away in this house in the middle of the night, just like Bo, with the one carer by his side. The little note that I finished the book with is basically exactly like it was for my granddad.
Her research on masculinity in rural northern communities had turned up a pattern that her own life had already shown her: men who endured rather than spoke, who were overrepresented in suicide statistics, and who found no cultural framework for asking for help. Bo is the fictional figure she built from years of collecting those life stories, and the question he fails to answer across the full length of the novel is the same one her fieldwork kept returning to.
I’m very interested in emotions and vulnerability and empathy and relationship-building. It can be about, for example, experiencing difficulty talking about particular vulnerable feelings with one’s father or other men — that one simply grits one’s teeth instead of asking for help when feeling bad. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Ambiguity held open, labor made visibleRidzén made a deliberate choice not to let the novel resolve into a story of blame. Hans, Bo’s son, is not a villain; he is a person trying, like everyone else in the book, and she wanted readers to stay inside that discomfort rather than find relief in assigning fault. The same deliberateness extended to the emotional texture she was after.
I wanted to portray how — this goes along with the ambiguity — multiple contradictory feelings can exist simultaneously within one person, and how our feelings may change over the day, over an hour, and over a year and a lifetime.
She also wanted readers to see the home care workers as something other than background. Their labor, she argued, belongs to the same category of invisible essential work as the interior emotional lives of the men her research had documented.
These carers are so much more important to the elderly than we realize, and my own experience working in the home services is that aging also creates this certain need and tendency to reflect back on your life.
After publication, she received letters from a reader she had not specifically written for: men who said they almost never read fiction. Their response confirmed what her academic work had already told her about the cost of silence, and she named the gap plainly.
Out of all the letters and emails that I’ve received since my novel was published, many are signed by men who don’t usually read fiction. Clearly, it seems to fill a kind of gap, as if there were a lack of stories expressing male vulnerability.
The final thing she asks of readers is a shift of position, not an intellectual exercise but an act of imagination with practical consequences for how people treat the elderly in their own lives.
Always try to ask and imagine what it would be like if you were the aging one and put yourself in that person’s perspective. [paraphrased from audio]