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An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Month
One of Finland’s most dynamic novelists bursts onto the American literary scene with this erotic story of an ambitious therapist’s sessions with an unforgettable patient.
Natalia cannot stop thinking about sex.
With this mesmerizing tale of one woman’s potent affliction, award-winning Finnish writer Laura Lindstedt makes her American debut. Narrated by an unnamed, ungendered therapist who leaps at the chance to employ their most experimental methods, My Friend Natalia offers a gripping examination of the power dynamics always present but rarely ever spoken about in therapy. “Something flared within me,” the therapist notes, “and it wasn’t merely sympathy, the emotion I feel for most of my clients. It was more like a sudden experience of harmony, wholly inappropriate given the circumstances.”
It is clear from the moment Natalia barges into her new therapist’s office that she has motives beyond simply fixing her sex life. She is quick to mention that the same exact painting hanging on the therapist’s wall—an abstract piece titled Ear-Mouth—once hung in her grandmother’s living room. This comment deeply unsettles the therapist, as does the large alarm clock that Natalia brings with her, intent on timing the sessions herself. And the tape recorder.
At first, Natalia seems to play along with the rules of therapy. She partakes in the therapist’s pain-displacement exercises, word games, and even produces a few anatomical illustrations. She muses on the art of pornography, and boldly examines seminal figures like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom she poses the question, “Did Jean-Paul consider Simone a woman at all? Or was she nothing but a pencil sharpener?” By combining philosophy and literature, repressed childhood memories and explicitly unrepressed erotic experiences, the sessions quickly shed all inhibitions. Still, the therapist can’t help but wonder: What does Natalia really want?
Brilliantly translated by the award-winning David Hackston, My Friend Natalia buzzes in prose charged with sharp banter and double entendres as the therapist hurls strange—and hilarious—experimental exercises at Natalia, and their work builds to an explosive climax. In taking a deconstructive yet utterly scintillating approach to the self-help narratives of our time, Laura Lindstedt emerges as a rare and unflinching international literary talent.
Laura Lindstedt is the author of Oneiron, winner of the Finlandia Prize—the country’s highest literary honor. Her works have been sold in eighteen countries. She lives in Helsinki, where she is revising her PhD thesis.
Angela Ledgerwood is the host and creator of the Lit Up Podcast and the Editorial Director of Sugar23 Books, an imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, devoted to amplifying bold, inspiring, and timely stories from original voices. Previously she was Esquire’s online books columnist and a features editor at Cosmopolitan where she interviewed some of her favorite people including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Her nonfiction has been published in Marie Claire, Interview Magazine, The Coveteur, and Condé Nast Traveler, New York Magazine online, Elle, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review. Angela has moderated for literary festivals in the USA, including the Brooklyn Book Festival, the Texas Book Festival, Yale Writers Conference, The Sydney Writers' Festival, and more. Born in Sydney, Australia, Angela now lives in Manhattan, New York.
