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By Root 562 0

no longer resembles what it was when Stieg lived here. I could no longer bear opening my front door onto our former life, where the slightest detail reminded me that he was gone. I also bought a secondhand oriental rug for the living room, cheap: it was dirty and damaged, but it’s a Kashgai woven by one of the craftswomen of that nomadic Iranian tribe. On it is a garden full of trees and flowers, with some ducks, I believe, strolling around in the greenery. After washing and mending the rug, I laid it on the floor, put on a little music, and danced the salsa barefoot on this new realm. I felt in my body that the apartment had become mine, and that my home had lost that painful echo of happy times lost forever.

I RETURNED to my professional life in the building industry, still in the domain of sustainable development. This is my world. A hard and demanding world, but a fair one. My work has meaning because it acts on reality. I can use my skills freely and make decisions I find effective. This isn’t the virtual reality of the Millennium industry, where I can’t decide anything at all.

This Millennium industry was born in July 2005, seven months after Stieg died, when Men Who Hate Women (in English: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) came out in Sweden, and it has become a juggernaut with the success of the trilogy: more than forty million books have been sold to this date throughout the world, not to mention the audiobooks and the films for TV and the cinema. Along with this industry, a myth has sprung up: the Millennium Stieg. Everything under the sun has since been written and said about him. And usually by people who barely knew him, knew nothing of our life, and shared none of our struggles. Why? Because Stieg and I were never celebrities, never got the red-carpet treatment at evening premieres, never had the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, or El Pais clamoring to interview us the way they do now to talk to me about Stieg and the trilogy. Stieg’s real life, like mine, was often boring, always hardworking, and sometimes dangerous. That’s why those people who today have so much to say about him never came anywhere near us.

THE MILLENNIUM Trilogy is not just a good story made up by a good author of good crime novels. These books talk about the need to fight to defend one’s ideals, and the refusal to give up, to sell oneself, or to grovel before someone powerful. The novels speak of values, justice, of journalism in the noble sense of the word, of the integrity and efficiency some people bring to their jobs, including the police. The novels talk about morality, too. The virtual reality that has overtaken Stieg today has cast him as the hero of the trilogy. Well, Stieg didn’t wait for the Millennium books to be what he was. And in that reductive vision of Stieg, certain people have even tried to erase me from the map—along with our thirty-two years together! Unfortunately, this attitude is fueled in part by misogyny, and not just toward me: wherever the myth of Stieg Larsson is involved, women are always devalued, whereas he collaborated mostly with women all his life. In April 2007, my sister told me she’d just noticed that someone had changed the Wikipedia entry on Stieg: ever since November 18, 2006, the site now said that he had never lived with his grandparents, but always with his mother and father! And where the text had previously said that Eva Gabrielsson was his lifelong partner at the time of his death, now it read: “with whom he was living periodically at the time of his death.” The link with my interview on the problems with his estate, which had appeared in Attention, an economic journal, had also been removed.

SOMEWHERE AROUND 2006, the foreign media began to take an interest in the man behind The Millennium Trilogy, at first in the Scandinavian countries, then in Europe. Now members of the media from the United States and Australia come to Stockholm to talk to me about Stieg. They assume—correctly—that I must be the person with the most interesting things to say, after three decades of life with