This is the final day of my week with Lene Fogelberg, author of Beautiful Affliction. As, I’ve said all week, there is really no better way to introduce Lene than to share the heartfelt and utterly deserved praise I offered for her beautiful book:
Throughout the week Lene has shared an excerpt, plus eight poignant and stunning quotes from the book. Lene also shared a guest post, ‘Writing My Way Out of the Silence.’ Today in a bonus post, Lene shares eight additional quotes from Beautiful Affliction!
I hope you have enjoyed this week with Lene Fogelberg as much as I have enjoyed her breathtaking story!
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A flock of pigeons startles me, flapping between the trees, frightened by my approach. Black against the snow, they write the poem about the flock, the girls who need their mamma.
I am walking home, following my own footprints in the snow, and they look like letters on a page in a foreign language I cannot understand. I feel like I am walking in my own incomprehensible story, only in the middle of the story there is a black punctuation mark, and after that? What comes after that?
It’s like falling: a glass to the ground, my whole life in pieces: everything filtered through that small word abnormal.
The girl in the mirror is shaking and fighting back tears and her eyes tell me: Do not look away do not dare look away you have to see this.
Here is my body. Which I have fought and pleaded with and commanded and cared for and decorated and dressed and undressed and loved and hated.
They are all there; my body remembers them, all the memories written on my skin and in every movement.
My skin is soft under my fingers, will be soft under the scalpel. But my ribs are hard, resisting the line I’m drawing, the curve, showing the way to my heart.
Maybe there is an invisible world working behind our own, maybe words in the silence, maybe movements in what looks completely still.
Growing up in a small town on the Swedish West Coast, Lene Fogelberg developed a love of poetry and reading, nurtured by the enchanting surroundings of her childhood; deep woods, fields, and ocean.
Fogelberg went on to study Foreign Languages at the University of Gothenburg: among them English and French as well as Literature and Creative Writing. She also studied German in Germany and Creative Writing at the Stockholm Academy of Writing.
Always curious, Fogelberg has embraced opportunities to live abroad, in Germany and the USA. Shortly after moving to the US it was discovered, by luck of circumstances, that she was in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. Within weeks she underwent two life-saving open-heart surgeries and began the long battle of recovery. Now she is well and grateful for every day with her husband and two daughters. She is currently living in Jakarta, Indonesia.
An award-winning poet in Sweden, Fogelberg has always felt drawn to writing in English and switched language when writing the memoir BEAUTIFUL AFFLICTION, to be published by She Writes Press September 2015.
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The riveting true story of a young woman’s struggle to raise a family while her body slowly deteriorates as the result of an undetected fatal heart disease.
Lene Fogelberg is dying―she is sure of it―but no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with her husband, her two precious daughters, her enchanting surroundings, but the question she has carried in her heart since childhood―Will I die young?―is threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity. When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: she is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late?
Unflinchingly honest and often harrowing, Beautiful Affliction is an inspiring account of growing up and living on the verge of death―and of the beauty, harshness, loneliness, and, ultimately, unbending love that can be found there.
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View Lene’s other posts
A Week with Lene Fogelberg: Guest Post
This week I am joined by Lene Fogelberg, author of Beautiful Affliction. There is really no better way to introduce Lene than to share the heartfelt and utterly deserved praise I offered for her beautiful book: Please stop throughout the week as Lene shares a wonderful guest post, an excerpt, plus poignant and stunning quotes from the book.
A Week with Lene Fogelberg: Quick Quotes from Beautiful Affliction
This week I am joined by Lene Fogelberg, author of Beautiful Affliction. There is really no better way to introduce Lene than to share the heartfelt and utterly deserved praise I offered for her beautiful book: Please stop throughout the week as Lene shares an excerpt, plus more poignant and stunning quotes from the book.
A Week with Lene Fogelberg: Excerpt from Beautiful Affliction
This week I am joined by Lene Fogelberg, author of Beautiful Affliction. There is really no better way to introduce Lene than to share the heartfelt and utterly deserved praise I offered for her beautiful book: On Monday, Lene shared a guest post, ‘ Writing My Way Out of the Silence.’
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