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first read the text I disagreed with what he’d written. In that first version, when Mikael finds Harriet out in Australia, she exclaims almost in terror, “So now that you know I’m alive—what are you going to do? Are you going to rape me too?” I felt that readers would take those last words too literally and think Harriet was completely paranoid. Since Stieg was convinced I was wrong, we had argument after argument about this. In the end, he never said, “Okay, I’ll change it.” He never said anything. But he took out that sentence.

IN THE opening of the first book, after being accused of not verifying the evidence he uses for an expose of the industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, Mikael Blomkvist quits his job as the publisher of Millennium because he’s afraid that otherwise, readers will lose confidence in the magazine. Later, before he makes public the valid proof that has been gathered by Dag Svensson, he checks all this information with obsessive care. I know that behavior well from having watched Stieg at work, and he really did feel that sources were sacred—which is why Mikael erases from his computer all the files revealing any sources before the police arrive, after Dag and Mia have been murdered. And it makes clearer today why, after Stieg’s death, no one in his personal circle, myself included, wanted to say anything about the computer he was using. Besides the fourth Millennium novel in progress, it contained the names and contact information of his informants on the far right. And on this point, the Swedish constitution is clear: sources must be protected!

Feminism

THE MILLENNIUM Trilogy is a catalogue of all forms of violence and discrimination endured by women.

When he was a teenager in Umea, Stieg was devastated by a dramatic incident that marked him for life. One weekend, he witnessed the gang rape of a girl at a campground. Some of the rapists were friends of his, and he refused to have anything to do with them afterward. From that moment on, he blamed himself for not having intervened. A while after that horrible episode, he ran into the girl in town and tried to apologize. Refusing to hear him out, she drew back from him with an accusation he never forgot: “Get away from me! You’re one of them!”

Should this experience be seen as the source of his feminism? It most certainly contributed to it. While he was writing the trilogy, Stieg’s working title for all three books was The Men Who Hate Women. This title was retained only for the first volume of the Swedish edition, and even then, only because he strongly insisted on it. And the word “hate” in the title was replaced by “don’t love” in the French edition.

WHEN HE was young, Stieg had played drums with a pal who’d introduced him to jazz, but it was rock he loved best, especially feminine rock like Shakespears Sister, Annie Lennox in the Eurythmics, and Tina Turner. And Lisbeth just happens to have close ties to the girls in a rock band called Evil Fingers. My own tastes are a little broader, from opera through rock and mainstream to pop. At home, Stieg and I listened to different music, but not all that much of the time, actually.

We divided up the housekeeping according to our different inclinations: he liked to do housework, I preferred cooking. Since we both hated doing laundry with a passion, we took turns at that.

When I’d met Stieg in 1972, he was already a staunch feminist who preferred the company of women and liked working with them more than with men. What’s more, they generally liked him back: he used to say that when he was a child living with his grandparents, his best friend was—a little girl! He found women more creative and less ambitious, less conniving than men. Wherever he worked, Stieg treated men and women the same way, held them to the same standards, and didn’t mind one bit taking orders from women. If he encountered macho careerists who tried to block the advancement of “Stieg’s women,” he either obliged them to change their attitude or eliminated them from his private life. In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,