On Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition and the Hidden Disenfranchisement of Children

When I was growing up, my mom talked to my older sisters and me about sex in the simplest of terms: If we had sex, our father would have no choice but to throw us out of the house. It would be sad, of course, but this was all very reasonable and fair, she explained, because he paid for everything. 

Omitted from this reasoning, if it can be called that, was any consideration of a very simple question: What were our other options? There were none.

In Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Repetition, we repeatedly read some version of the same, seemingly mundane refrain about the 16-year-old protagonist: “So I ran home because where else would I go.” The protagonist has this thought at the beginning of Repetition, years after the main events of the novel, when she observes the silent abuse inflicted by two parents on their teen daughter at an orchestra concert—of course the daughter will still go home with her parents; where else could she go? The protagonist has this thought again, and again, and again, throughout the book, whether she’s out for an afternoon run, or at a train station pondering suicide amid a devastating conflict with her parents—only to change her mind and, naturally, return home. 

Because, like all teen girls, she has nowhere else to go. 

It’s a simple, shattering line that exposes the unspoken coerciveness of home life for most young people, the powerlessness of youth, and the toxicity and unreality of conservative notions of the traditional family unit as a bastion of safety and stability for children.

Reading Repetition, I was struck by the similarities to my own upbringing and trajectory—how familial tensions, adolescent sexual trauma, and the catharsis of processing this trauma through storytelling had the same effect, putting me, too, on the path to my career as a writer.

Repetition, primarily set in the month of November 1975, seemingly revolves around a 16-year-old girl’s fraught relationship with her mother and the devastating fallout of her parents learning (or believing they’ve learned) about the loss of her virginity. But through a series of chillingly understated, devastating revelations, Repetition becomes, above all, a story about the sweeping yet hidden disenfranchisement of children. 

”I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process,” the protagonist tells us. Her experiences at 16 indelibly shape the rest of her life by detonating deeper truths about her family that she’s always known but always denied, putting her on the path to her career as a writer.

Reading Repetition, I was struck by the similarities to my own upbringing and trajectory—how familial tensions, adolescent sexual trauma, and the catharsis of processing this trauma through storytelling had the same effect, putting me, too, on the path to my career as a writer.

*

My first sexual experience, when I was 16, was my worst sexual experience, because my first sexual experience was rape. Enough years passed and, at different points, I would feel all sorts of ways about it. During my freshman year of college, we were all so desperate to make friends that as a common bonding exercise we’d share the wide-ranging, awful scenarios in which we’d lost our virginity—all the unskilled boyfriends, the inexperienced lovers. I knew no one wanted to hear that I’d been raped; that would have been a real mood killer, and I didn’t want to be a mood killer, I wanted to make friends, and so, all I said was, “It sucked. Ugh. Boo. Boys need to stop watching such fucked-up porn!”

In Repetition, decades after the traumatic events of November 1975, the protagonist, now a successful fiction writer, recalls joking in the present day about what happened when she was 16 over beers with friends. She later feels a flash of guilt over this, wondering if her jokes make her just like all the other adults who refused to take her younger self seriously. 

My sexual assault, which would mark a turning point in my relationship with my parents, also happened in the month of November. My assailant, who was my long-time crush, left because the blood grossed him out. In Repetition, the protagonist’s father confronts her after reading a diary entry in which she describes losing her virginity, and asks her, “Did you bleed?” The question stays with her for years.

After my assailant left, I got on my knees and began scrubbing my blood from the floor. When my mom got home from work she observed, irritably, that I (he) hadn’t fully shut the front door, that I’d (he’d) left it slightly ajar, and what if some deranged criminal, some rapist, who just so happened to be cruising the cul de sac of our affluent Bay Area neighborhood teeming with home security systems, had seen the door was open and come inside and raped me? She yelled at me for my carelessness and sent me back to my room, where I resumed quietly scrubbing my blood from the floor.

*

After the assault, I refused for some time to classify it as such. There was no other way to label being forced into a sexual act, but I remained in denial because I didn’t want to see it this way. So, I omitted this detail when I spoke about the experience with friends. I’d had sex, I told myself, and others, and I was very curious about the whole affair, because it was such an odd experience. I had to debrief about it, to try to make sense of it, to talk about it with vague fondness and joy and excitement to prove more to myself than anyone that I was OK. I talked about it to one friend and then another. Eventually, the story reached the wrong person, who called my family’s landline and told my parents, using the same terms I’d used. 

I told my parents this was just some crazy girl who hated me and wanted to ruin my life. I prayed that in their own desperation to not believe what the person had said, their need to convince themselves—just as I’d needed to convince myself—that I hadn’t been assaulted, that they would believe me. And they did. 

It’s impressive, terrifying really, the kinds of things we can make ourselves believe. In Repetition, the protagonist, at 16, speculates that her mother is so hysterically controlling of her behaviors because of how deeply she fears a version of her daughter that she’s constructed in her own mind:

She wanted to get under my clothes and under my skin and into my head in order to read my mind to learn what triggered her unbearable fear, but as that was impossible, she invented her own version of me instead. Her fear created me because fear and imagination go together.

For most of the book, the protagonist herself is in denial about a hidden-away childhood trauma, the reality of which would shatter the fragile homeostasis of her family life, an outcome she can’t handle. And so, she tells us:

I didn’t and I couldn’t acknowledge whatever it was that was threatening to rise up inside me because I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with it or handle it, I had a strong hunch that it would kill me and so I fought it.

For a long time, the phone call went uncommented on between my parents and me, and the three of us seemingly moved on. The first time I hung out with friends after school without telling my parents I’d be home a bit later—once a normal, everyday occurrence—my parents were furious and I was effectively barred from leaving the house for weeks. They didn’t mention the girl’s phone call but it hung in the air, unspoken; they believed her now. On some level, I think they always did. 

Enough time passed and my parents calmed down. I suspect my dad even felt guilty; here and there he would make an uncharacteristically kind comment, or say kind things about me for me to hear, that his daughter was very smart and talented, she was smarter and more talented than his brothers’ daughters or his friends’ daughters because it’s always about competing with and showing up some man or another, right? 

A few months later, while I visited my sister in college during my spring break, my mom cleaned my room and found pregnancy tests. When I returned home, she confronted me. She cried; she asked me where my father and her had gone wrong with me, specifically, because my older sisters hadn’t done this, it was just me, so they’d gone wrong somewhere with me. When she pressed me on the phone call from all those months ago, I admitted it had all been true. In that moment I felt as if I were not in my own body; observing the scene from outside myself, it seemed so absurd that I laughed.

My mom cried harder: “You think this is funny?” She told me, at last, that she wouldn’t tell my dad, because he’d throw me out, and he’d be justified in doing so, because he pays for everything, he pays for this house, and you still did that, you did that in his house. He would be justified in throwing me out, she said, but she would do me the profound kindness of not telling him. She and I, alone, would simply have to live together in this shame.

To this day, for the life of me, I don’t know what there was to forgive. I was a girl, I was a girl who liked a boy, who was hurt by a boy and then punished for it; yet, somehow, I was the one who had to be forgiven.

Decades later, the protagonist of Repetition reflects on her mother and father’s relationship, about the devastating truths that are the source of her mother’s intense anxieties. The mother is, in some ways, as trapped as her daughter is: she’s uneducated, unable to pay a bill, utterly dependent on their family staying exactly as it is. To question or go against the grain of their household’s dynamic is unthinkable to her; thus, her frustrations are exacted upon her daughter for challenging these dynamics by merely existing as a teen girl. 

My conversation with my own mother that night felt endless, but we must have eventually stopped talking because I wound up at school the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. I think my mom eventually forgave me; within weeks we started telling each other “I love you” and even laughing together again. Over a year later, the night before I left for college—a five-hour drive away, my mom driving me by herself because my dad was abroad—I slept in my mom’s bed with her, because we’d have to wake up so early that it made sense for us to wake up together. I fell asleep and woke up at some point between twilight and sunrise; I woke up in her arms, and she didn’t realize I was awake. I felt her breathe, I felt her cry, and I was certain, then, that she’d forgiven me. To this day, for the life of me, I don’t know what there was to forgive. I was a girl, I was a girl who liked a boy, who was hurt by a boy and then punished for it; yet, somehow, I was the one who had to be forgiven.

Repetition, at its core, is a story about punishment and victimhood. More specifically, it is a story of being punished for being a victim.

*

As I read Repetition, I was struck by its parallels with my own adolescent experiences—how sexuality was or rather wasn’t at all discussed in my religious, immigrant household growing up; the ways I was endangered as a result of this; and, consequently, the ways that I was punished for being harmed.

The shattering truths at the heart of Repetition don’t reveal themselves until toward the end. The novel isn’t just a story about the cruel policing of female adolescent sexuality. It’s also a biting tale of sexual trauma, memory, and all the things we simultaneously remember and try (often unsuccessfully) to forget as survivors. We learn, eventually, that many years ago the protagonist experienced child sexual abuse from her father that her parents desperately wish to conceal; this reality goes seemingly uncommented on between the family all their lives. In her parents’ paranoia that she may one day speak up, they’ve come to see her as their oppressor rather than their victim—a timeless dynamic in abusive scenarios. Her father seems to have pity, above all, for himself; in a drunken stupor on the night her parents learn (or believe they learn) she had sex, he repeats to himself, “It isn’t easy being human.” 

As for the protagonist’s own mother, as Madeline Gressel writes for Parapraxis: “Again and again, the mother chooses a convenient lie—my husband did not molest my daughter—over an inconvenient truth, which would require a strength of character that she does not possess.”

Reading Repetition prompted me to confront long-buried memories, and reminded me that healing and making sense of sexual trauma, and making sense of our relationships with our families, is a lifelong and nonlinear journey.

Over the course of the months thereafter, the protagonist considers suicide; she nearly throws herself on train tracks, until she encounters a teacher who commends her on a recent paper she wrote and tells her she could make a living as a writer someday. Writing becomes the protagonist’s salvation, the reason she chooses to live—even as she struggles for years to write freely and shed the mental self-policing her parents have instilled in her.

At the height of my strained relationship with my parents and the intense shame I felt in the aftermath of my assault, I fantasized about suicide; I remember writing a dramatic note to my parents on college-ruled binder paper because I didn’t want to look like an idiotic child writing her suicide note on wide-ruled binder paper. “I can’t do it, I can’t live with you both thinking this of me, goodbye,” I wrote. I decided against harming myself because it occurred to me that I wanted to write a book someday, maybe two; I loved to write and this whole ordeal suddenly seemed so unfair: I was the one who had been harmed, I was the one who was being wronged—why should I be the one to be killed, my 16-year-old self reasoned, when I deserved it the least? 

I chose to live because I realized that someday no threat of homelessness would hang implicitly over my head if I dared to be intimate with someone. Someday I would be intimate with someone and they would stop if I told them to, and I might even enjoy it, and it wouldn’t just be fodder for jokes with other girls about how bad sex was. Someday I would live—on my terms, not my assailant’s, and not my parents’. Someday I would go home to somewhere safe, somewhere without arbitrary and cruelly enforced rules, somewhere other than my parents’ house.

Through nearly a decade of writing and reporting on gender-based violence and rape culture, I am still processing so many aspects of my own upbringing. Reading Repetition prompted me to confront long-buried memories, and reminded me that healing and making sense of sexual trauma, and making sense of our relationships with our families, is a lifelong and nonlinear journey. As Hjorth’s protagonist tells us:

Generations will follow the course of generations, and we are tied to our family from our first breath to our last.

Over and over, Repetition’s protagonist must return home, no matter the mistreatment from her parents that she knows awaits her. She has no say in the matter; she has nowhere else to go.

If my sisters and I had sex, my mom told 16-year-old me, our dad would have no choice but to throw us out. He was the one, as she put it, who had “no choice”—not me, not my sisters. Yet I didn’t choose to be born, to have no money, no other place to live, and so of course I took from my parents, took from my father, took what they provided, what he provided. I wasn’t a leech; I was a child. I wasn’t lucky; I was, if anything, quite unlucky that this was how my parents—who believed, who really, truly believed, that they loved me more than anything in the world—saw me: as essentially subhuman, as a pet to feed and train and punish at will. This is the crushing, inescapable reality of youth—a reality I’ve never seen captured with more nuance and compassion than in Hjorth’s Repetition.