What does it mean to be a friend of Sally’s?
At first it means that you never, ever say it out loud to her. Otherwise: Be ready to get a real bloody nose!
No, Lisbeth Salander doesn’t easily accept someone as her ‘friend’, much less admits that she herself finds someone worthy of that description.
So … what does it mean to be a friend of Sally’s? I wasn’t just being ironic, or tongue-in-cheek, when I made up that title for our fan-site, you know.
I really wanted something different, first and foremost. I was so insidiously tired (bet you can’t say that either in English) of what by some is referred to as the ‘Millennium industry’: All the half-hearted commercial sites that really don’t have any content of value but just want to rake in money by having more people buy the books and go see the movies. Sure, that is a perfectly legit objective – without sales, the legacy of Mr. Blomkvist and Ms. Salander will not continue to explode into the collective consciousness of the Internet and elsewhere (is there really any other consciousness than the internet nowadays?!).
And I really, deeply missed something genuine – something that would resonate with my personal feelings about Millennium and the awesome and original characters in those books, all of whom just seemed to continue to ‘drag me in’. They – or perhaps rather Stieg – wanted me to be part of that world, wanted me to have an opinion, to take action – or at least imagine that I did.
So in the end, as always happens, I knew I had to do something about that yearning myself – to be more a part of the Millennium ‘world’. I wanted something more than I could get just by browsing random sites put up overnight by advertisement bureaux, the employees of which probably never even have read the damn books! (The infamous bullet-in-the-forehead teaser poster for Millennium 3 is a case in point!)
And then I made sallys.
I really had no idea what I would end up with, or how much time I would be able to spend on building the site. But now, approximately 6 months after I really got started, I can tell you that we have about 2500 visits per month (and about 1/4 of those people who keep coming back); about 50 pages of material and over 150 comments + a Facebook group and a twittter-stream.
Nice.
I love it. I really love that you guys (and girls) are out there and chipping in from time to time with your views and comments and suggestions. Maybe we don’t have a super-duper-million-visitors-a-month site (yet), but right now I prefer quality over quantity. I prefer some real Sally friends as to a horde of people who just pop by, and then pop away forever, maybe just leaving a small remark that they really ‘dig the books’ and nothing more.
And that brings me back to my starting point:
What does it mean to be a friend of Sally’s?
Well, in the books it’s obvious that it means a lot of trials (both literally and metaphorically 
)!
It’s not easy being a friend of Lisbeth Salander, especially because it’s so one way. Lisbeth doesn’t let you in easily. You may even have had sex together, by some ‘accident’ or other, but in the end that doesn’t make you more intimate, from a personal POW. It just made you another guy (or girl) Lisbeth had sex with to show much much she’s in control – and to blow off some steam. (At least that’s my interpretation of her sexual appetite.)
No, Lisbeth Salander will remain a mystery to you, even long after she may have typed a few, personal words to you on a long-distance chat (and it could take years to get that far!). She doesn’t open up easily to other people. She’s simply too hurt, too damaged, or maybe – just a little bit too not-normal in a way we’ll never really understand – to conform to the social conventions you and I take for granted. You have to be really patient with her, in other words.
You have to go through fire and water (but mostly fire)
Maybe even face a serial killer or another trial, where you feel you get too much involved for your own good. You’d rather be a little bit more anonymous, not really in the search light of all sorts of government and police agencies or blonde hulks, who have the annoying habit of taking delight in twisting other people’s necks.
But that’s what you get, if you want to be a friend of Lisbeth’s – and perhaps other women like her. You somehow have to make up for the whole void that they have inside – the void which should have been filled out by something ‘normal’:
Trust, confidence, ability to ‘read people’, to socialize, to communicate openly and honestly. All of which was brutalized away in some dark childhood that may or may not have ended with a matchstick thrown into a milk carton of gasoline and then thrown into the ugly mug of your oppressor.
No, Lisbeth Salander is not easy to befriend, and I don’t think any of us ever really will be able to. But we might do our best, again and again, to lend her a hand when she’s gotten herself into new trouble, not asking for anything in return, treating her with dignity and respect.
And even if we never get anything in return, as some of us may secretly yearn for – no matter what we say in public; well, maybe it will still be worth it. But with Lisbeth you never know for sure.
Consider this a fair warning.
Chris
Categories: Books, From the Fans, Themes
1 Comment »
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February 2nd, 2011 at 2:15 AM
very nice, I so wish someone would publish the parts of the fourth novel, desperately hoping their will be some gothic style romance between Lisbeth and Mikael! and what about that no so wonderful sister of Lisbeth, hmmm…