‘Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘could cope with much more than you. You’re a poor imitation of Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says. ‘What I have done is nothing compared to what Victor Andreasen did to Tove Ditlevsen.’ The Danish author Tove Ditlevsen and Victor Andreasen, the editor-in-chief of Ekstra Bladet, stayed together their whole lives, almost, no matter what one did to the other. Because they loved each other. ‘We love each other, Ida! You know that!’

Tove Ditlevsen, she answers in their imagined conversations, ended up killing herself. Tove Ditlevsen was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and Victor Andreasen couldn’t take any more and left her, she reminds herself. Perhaps Tove Ditlevsen should have left Victor Andreasen much sooner. Then she might not have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, she might not have killed herself, who knows. Tove Ditlevsen planned to write a book about her life with Victor Andreasen, whom she referred to as a highly intelligent psychopath, did you know that, the title of which would be The Woman Who Put Up With Everything, a bittersweet title, if you ask me, as if she might well have many regrets and would have done things differently had she had the chance, she tells herself quietly in their imagined conversations.