The first one is Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

It’s one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. I could really identify with Clarissa, this empty, poor person who is going out to find some flowers for a party. At the same moment, we are following her out into the beautiful morning as the story starts. It’s clear very soon that Clarissa is a woman who has lost her soul among all the duties and conventions of a boring marriage. That loss is so overwhelming and confusing that she loses contact even with her own body. She describes feeling young, but at the same time really old. I don’t know why I identified with her so strongly. At the time I read it I was married, and maybe I knew what was coming. I read it again recently and it felt so accurate, even though things have of course changed. We have legislation against gender discrimination, the right to vote, free abortion, day care – at least in Sweden we do. But even so, it felt modern because family conservatism as the norm is stronger than it’s ever been. People today are marrying more traditionally than ever. In Sweden we have a huge wedding industry – people putting down a lot of money and energy, which is kind of weird in a way.

Why do you find it weird? Would you advise people to not get married?

No, but today we are free to organise our life however we want to. We have all different kinds of family. When Virginia Woolf wrote this book, you needed to be married, there were no options. But today, for my generation, there is no need to get married. Not so many of us are religious, and a woman can be fine without a marriage.

But we fall in love as much as we ever did.

Yes, but falling in love is something else. The ritual of marriage is old-fashioned, if you think about it. We are living in a time which is very conservative when it comes to family issues. We had a women’s movement in the 70s that talked about our liberation and freedom, so it’s strange that my generation, the daughters of these women, have effected a backlash. Have you seen Mad Men? It’s not a coincidence that it’s so popular right now. There is a passage in Mrs Dalloway where Clarissa says she can’t think, write or play piano – she mixes up Armenians and Turks and doesn’t know where the Equator is. This made me think about Lady Diana. She was also an unhappy woman who lost her soul in marriage and convention. It also made me think about Desperate Housewives – women today who are dealing with their looks instead of using their brains.

Now we’ve got Erica Jong, Fear of Flying.

I was looking for books that dealt with these issues of family, love and the ability to live. When I was starting to write Bitter Bitch, I looked for literature dealing with the issues burning inside me. That is, whether there was any possibility of living and loving within a romantic relationship. I couldn’t find anything written today. It was all written in the 70s. This is about Isadora, and her trip away from a psychoanalyst conference she is attending with her husband. She is 30, married for seven years, and she runs away. She has longings for other men and is confused because her husband is a very nice man. It’s a very funny book. She runs away with Adrian, whom she meets at the conference. You follow her background, childhood, how she grew up and how everything is linked together. It made a lot of people really upset.

Why was it controversial? It doesn’t sound that controversial.

I think it was because it was about a woman and her sexual needs. Though it isn’t actually that much about sex. It’s about her journey from a girl with fears and low self-esteem, and her way of becoming a mature woman who wants to own her soul. She finds out in running away that she needs to be true to herself, that she has an obligation to herself. She wants to own her soul and not feel guilty about it. It’s her journey of liberation.