Freyja has such a haunting sense of place. What is it about Iceland’s landscape—especially the black sand beaches and harsh coastline—that made it the right setting for this story?
During my visits to Iceland as a child, I spent a lot of time looking out at the landscape—black-sand beaches, lava fields, roiling sea—from the backseat of the car. My family is originally from the South Coast, home to majestic waterfalls, glaciers, beaches, and perhaps above all, stories. Many of the most famous Icelandic sagas took place in this area, and, more anecdotally, someone always seemed to have a tale about this boulder, that lake, this hill. Stories felt written into the landscape.
This region of the country is, for me, where the line between natural and supernatural wobbles: the starkness of the sky, the extreme weather, the quiet, the moss-covered lava rocks, the mist. I needed this setting in order to animate the folklore I wanted to explore throughout the book.
The novel deals so powerfully with memory, grief, and guilt. What drew you to those themes?
I didn’t necessarily set out to explore these themes; they emerged organically from the story. But they must be a preoccupation of mine, because at the same time I was writing this novel, I was also writing a doctoral dissertation on literature after 9/11—a topic imbued with these same themes.
Memory in particular fascinates me because, from the inside, memories often feel fixed and infallible. But we know this isn’t the case. I’m compelled by the idea that each time we retrieve a memory, we rewrite it slightly in light of who we are in that moment. In some ways, that gives new language to what I’ve always loved about writers like William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf (affectionately, my literary godfather and godmother): the sense that the past is not past. It’s alive in the present and shaping the future.
Unnur is carrying both personal trauma and the weight of the past. How did you go about building her voice and emotional world?
My entry into Unnur was her love for her daughter, as that feels vital and familiar to me; it’s where we overlap. Once I had that anchor in place, I could then get curious about her internal world, especially the impact of the trauma from her childhood on her adult life. Freyja’s disappearance changed the soil of Unnur’s life. Everything that grew afterward emerged from that altered ground—her fear, her vigilance, her silence, and above all her ferocious love for her daughter.
The idea of a childhood disappearance reverberating into adulthood is chilling. What interested you in exploring how a single event can shape an entire life?
That exploration—of how a single event can shape an entire life—is at the heart of the book, and at the heart of how I came to write the book. In my early twenties, I survived a sudden medical crisis that could have ended my life—a personal before and after moment that continues to shape me. Writing Freyja enabled me, indirectly, to live inside questions that have haunted me for over a decade: What if I hadn’t been okay—what would that have meant for the people I love? How do I live in the wake of almost dying?
Motherhood feels central to the novel in several different ways. How did your own thinking about motherhood shape the book?
When my daughter was a toddler, she once fell from a chair, landing face-first on the floor. Her nose bled, she screamed and cried, and as I held her, she was so shaken that she vomited all over both of us. In that moment, I experienced a strange sense of peace. There truly was nowhere else I would rather be, nowhere else I could imagine being. All that mattered was consoling her, telling her she would be okay, telling her I was there, being there. The devotion I feel to her is unlike anything I have known.
I couldn’t have written the book the way I did if I hadn’t first become a mother, not least because it was through motherhood that I came to understand Unnur as a character. Both narratively and emotionally, her daughter Lilja is what’s at stake, and she knows it.
There is a strong undercurrent of fear and vulnerability throughout, but also resilience. Were you consciously trying to balance suspense with emotional depth?
I’m not someone who reads for plot alone, so I certainly aspired to balance suspense with emotional depth. Suspense and high stakes become meaningful to me when paired with deeply drawn characters, psychological depth, and evocative language. I wanted the revelations to matter not just for the mystery, but because they enable Unnur to better understand her history, her family, and herself.
You’ve lived between Iceland and America. Did that dual perspective influence how you wrote about Iceland, memory, and belonging?
In some ways, the book is like a hologram, with chapters set in the past revealing one side of my relationship with Iceland and chapters set in the present reflecting another. Growing up in America, I felt a great longing for Iceland. The chapters set in the countryside capture some of what I remember from childhood, and what I yearned for from afar. The chapters set in Reykjavík reflect my more grounded experience of day-to-day living in Iceland.
I now sometimes joke that in America I feel very Icelandic, and in Iceland I feel very American. When I pick my daughter up from school, she often fields a flurry of high-pitched questions from classmates about why her mom speaks English, where her mom is from, why her mom is in Iceland. This is a small island with a strong shared sense of language and culture, and so it doesn’t take much to feel like an outsider, or at least to feel not quite like an insider.
The novel has literary depth but also the propulsion of a mystery. Did you always see Freyja as working in both spaces?
Yes, I did. I’m in awe of authors like Tana French and Liz Moore who so elegantly balance depth, beauty, humanity, and momentum. I also see these spaces as entwined rather than opposites. Beneath the desire to know what happens next are deeper questions about who these characters are, what they’re hiding, what they’ve buried, and why they do what they do. I wanted Freyja to move at the pace of a mystery but linger with readers like a literary novel.
Norse folklore and myth seem to shadow the book. How important were those elements to you while writing?
Icelandic folklore was central to me while writing, and I wanted to render it in a way that felt essential rather than ornamental. These stories were part of my upbringing and part of my sense of Iceland.
When my family stayed at my godfather’s house when I was little, my dad would enlist one of my teenage relatives to sit in the room with me while I napped, because the guest room was rumored to be frequented by hidden people. When my brother and I misbehaved, my mom—who is not Icelandic but latched onto some of these same stories—used to say things like “I think the elves stole my good children.”
The challenge in this novel was to make these stories matter not just to the atmosphere, but to the mystery. I drew inspiration from the folkloric elements of Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, two of my all-time favorite novels.
The relationship between the past and the present feels especially tense here. What was the biggest challenge in revealing information at the right pace?
I knew that in dual-timeline novels, readers are often especially eager to get back to the present-tense story. And so, I knew that when writing two timelines, I needed to, in a sense, earn the chapters set in the past. A large part of this involved thinking carefully about placement—when to leave the present and enter the past—as well as ensuring the two timelines were in meaningful dialogue with each other, whether on the level of language and theme or in service of the mystery.
At the same time, the past needed to be more than an accessory to the present; it needed its own narrative arc. Mysteries and thrillers are already carefully crafted puzzles, but adding a second timeline was like adding another dimension to the puzzle. My process involved a lot of trial and error: reading each timeline on its own, shifting chapters around, cutting and combining scenes, and paying close attention to the hinge between one timeline and the next.
Freyja touches on the fear of not being able to trust one’s own memory. Why does that idea resonate with you?
I actually have a very good memory—too good, sometimes. There are things I wish I could forget but cannot.
But I’m very interested in traumatic memory, and in how it differs from ordinary memory. A few years ago, I published a personal essay that dealt, in part, with surviving a mass shooting in Colorado. During the fact-checking process, I was confronted with several details I had remembered with absolute certainty that turned out not to be accurate. The fact-checker had maps, news reports, timelines—and I had to grapple with the fact that my memory of this intensely traumatic event was fragmented, altered, and in some ways plain incorrect.
Something similar happens to Unnur: as a child, she endures a life-altering event in the Dark Valley, and her memory of it is fragmented and faulty. She fears knowing the truth, because she thinks it might implicate her. But the not-knowing comes at a cost too, slowly eating away at her.
There’s a deeply intimate quality to the novel, even as it unfolds like a suspense story. Did the book begin for you with character, atmosphere, or plot?
When I began writing this novel, I wanted to give life to some of the stories my dad had told me about his childhood years in Iceland, especially being sent as a young boy to work summers on the farm of a distant relative. Suffice it to say, he did not speak fondly of those years. I also wanted to explore the landscape that’s home to my family history—the South coast. Maybe most of all, I wanted to capture what Iceland meant to me growing up—not just atmosphere, but a felt sense of longing and belonging.
The book evolved immensely in the years that followed. While I had a clear vision for the strange, hazy childhood chapters in the countryside, I didn’t yet know the present-day storyline. That only began to take shape after I moved to Iceland and became a mother. Character and plot grew out of the Iceland I wanted to portray—both the real place I know now and the remembered, half-mythic place I carried with me as a child.
You’ve said you began the book for your grandmother and finished it for your daughter. How did that emotional arc affect the final shape of the novel?
I started the book for the little girl inside me, who remembers her amma telling stories about trolls and hidden people, and I finished the book for the little girl I’m now charged with raising and caring for. The book began from a place of nostalgia, a yearning for the memories I carried from my own childhood and the images I pieced together from stories my dad and grandmother told me. I set out to write a sort of love letter to Iceland, but after I became a mom, the book became, as well, a love letter to my daughter. The idea that she might one day hold this story in her hands was very powerful to me.
What do you hope readers take away from Freyja once they reach the final page?
I hope readers of Freyja are both propelled by its mystery and moved by its humanness. I hope they feel they’ve taken a journey not only into a puzzle, but into questions of memory, grief, motherhood, and redemption. By the end, I hope that within the darkness of the story, they’ve also felt its light and warmth.
Since this is your debut, what surprised you most about the process of writing and finishing a novel of this scale?
When I first started writing the book, people would ask me about it all the time. “Who’s going to play me in the movie?” — comments like that. But a few years into the process of drafting, revising, querying, and so on, very few people brought up the book anymore. I think it is a shock to many, myself included, how slow the work of bringing a book into the world can be.
In the early stages, I felt buoyed by all the people who believed in me—a bit like running a race (I used to be a runner), with supporters on both sides of the starting line. But the miles are long, and sometimes lonely, and no one can run them for you. When I was little, my dad used to read to me from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—.” There’s a line about being utterly spent and yet finding within yourself the will to “hold on,” to keep going. Of all the different facets of this process, what I’m most proud of—and what means the most to me—is that I did not quit.
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