The Break-Up Retreat(100)

It begins, in this writer’s opinion, with a vision. As described in Doctor Martina Hasting’s bestselling book, Freud’s Ex-Girlfriend , it went something like this: “You should not have to apologize. You should not have to cower, or make yourself smaller. You should get to live unapologetically, without making excuses for who or what you are. Any person who cannot give you that is denying you the fundamental right of any woman, or any person: self-actualization.”

Susannah Wallin wanted to live unapologetically. And, in the end, it cost five people their lives.





I stop reading, too consumed by the urge to edit and rewrite—it’s too late for that, now, and if they hate it, I just have to live with that—and I scroll back up to the top, to where the space for a headline is still empty.

I can’t find a way to title it.

Maybe it will just have to stand as it is.

When I look at the time, the clock tells me it’s time to go. It’ll take twenty minutes to get to the Stockholm Daily offices, and my meeting is at noon.

I’m about to close my computer, but then I stop.

I hesitate, but then, at the very top, I write:

by: Isobel Lindschold

I look at it. And I smile.

I always imagined that my first big article would be under the name my father ruined for us. The name I walked away from when I was sixteen years old. As a way to reclaim it, and reclaim what he took from me, and from us.

But he doesn’t seem to matter so much, anymore.