It is Christmas Eve, and a pale yellow brimstone butterfly flutters through the pages. The narrator, curled on a sofa with her notebook, notes that the creature is, against all seasonal logic, alive. This fleeting apparition closes Isabella Nilsson’s new essay collection, “Om varmhållning av levande döda” (On Keeping the Living Dead Warm), a book that begins in a very different kind of glass enclosure: a hospital incubator. “My first night in life I spent alone, placed on a heating pad in a small bed on wheels,” Nilsson writes. “The bed resembled a gratin dish … the high glass edges separating me from the surroundings.” The image sets the tone for a work that moves between isolation and the fragile warmth of language.

The collection, published by Ellerströms, spans eleven essays arranged month by month, from January 2025 to the following Christmas. Six of the texts have appeared before; together they form a sustained meditation on writing as practice and identity. Nilsson, who broke through with the wordplay-rich “Nonsensprinsessans dagbok”, has always written about writing. That debut was born from a pact with her mother: when the author was struggling with severe anorexia and lost will to live, her mother urged, “Don’t die, write instead.” The new book returns to this founding myth, probing whether literature can truly save a life. In one essay, Nilsson likens her compulsion to the Isabelle Adjani character in Andrzej Żuławski’s horror film “Possession”, who abandons her family for a monster; here, the monster is writing itself.

Throughout, Nilsson constructs and dismantles the romantic archetype of the author: lonely, alcoholic, nocturnal, born to outsiderdom. Temporary lovers appear as tropes—a man nicknamed “Kurt Cobain”, a Porsche driver with tours in Afghanistan, a literary scholar writing a dissertation—each exposing the difficulty of choosing between love and the page. A reviewer in Göteborgs-Posten notes that the book works best when read “as a fiction over an authorial self”, its darkness sometimes tipping into aesthetic provocation, as when a rape at fourteen is recounted with a decadence reminiscent of a Lana Del Rey song. Yet the voice is not merely bleak. Dagens Nyheter’s critic finds “tender and playful parts, wise poem analyses and literary reasoning”, and points to a chapter on the poet Gunnar Ekelöf where Nilsson observes that nonsense poetry is, above all, “kind”.

In a June interview with Aftonbladet, Nilsson announced she would stop writing, or at least pause for a decade. She told the newspaper that the central question of her book is whether literature is constructive or destructive, and that her current answer is definitive: it is destructive. “But during other phases it has saved my life,” she added. The book itself, Dagens Nyheter suggests, is neither wholly one nor the other—perhaps it is more like a reading lamp toward which a winter butterfly might steer.

The final pages return to the incubator, the narrator preferring to be “anaesthetised in literature’s incubator for the unfit for life” than numbed by self-starvation, drink, pills or a lover’s grip. Then the butterfly reappears, living its light yellow life regardless of words or people. “Imagine that such things exist too,” the critic writes. It is an image of stubborn, unspectacular survival, a small warmth held against the cold.