Kate Bornstein’s Hej grymma värld: 101 alternativ till självmord is more than just the Swedish translation of Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws. It’s a lifeline thrown with radical compassion, irreverent humor, and unconditional acceptance toward anyone teetering on the edge of despair. Written by one of the most provocative, tender, and truth-telling voices in queer literature, this book is a rebellious act of survival in a world that often refuses to make space for those who don’t fit in.
Bornstein, who identifies as non-binary and has lived a deeply complex and layered life, writes from personal experience, about pain, survival, and the strange alchemy of choosing to live when every signal in the world tells you not to.
The book doesn’t offer medical advice or polished therapeutic mantras. Instead, it offers a sprawling, messy, brilliant list of 101 things you might try instead of killing yourself. These range from the expected, like talking to someone or writing in a journal, to the outrageous, including dyeing your hair an absurd color or running away to join the circus (yes, literally). The message isn’t that any single one of these ideas is a magic fix, but rather that survival can be creative, unruly, and fiercely individual.
In an interview with The Heroines, Bornstein explained that the list wasn’t designed to cure depression but to “buy time”, to keep the reader alive long enough for other forms of healing or meaning to take root. “I want people to stay alive by any means necessary, as long as they’re not being mean,” she says. That one caveat, “just don’t be mean”, is the only rule in this anarchist’s guide to living. And it’s a beautiful one.
Hej grymma värld addresses its readers directly, often breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge the strangeness of talking about suicide in a book that’s trying to be funny, sexy, or weird. Bornstein doesn’t shy away from the darkness, they’ve lived through anorexia, PTSD, cancer, a violent split from the Church of Scientology, and being excommunicated by their own daughter due to Scientology’s policy of disconnection. But it’s precisely this intimate knowledge of pain that makes the book so disarming. Bornstein isn’t theorizing about suicidal ideation from a distance; they’ve lived it. And they lived through it.
As Carol Queen put it, if this book falls into the “wrong” hands, adults, outsiders, queers, the lonely, the aging, the burned-out, it might end up saving them, too. There’s something deeply generous about that. The advice here doesn’t expire when you hit 20 or 30 or 60. It’s for anyone who has ever felt like an alien on their own planet.
Bornstein’s life itself reads like a novel. Raised in a Conservative Jewish family in New Jersey, she once belonged to the high-ranking Sea Org of Scientology. She later underwent sex reassignment surgery in the 1980s but quickly realized she didn’t identify as a woman, or a man. “I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man,” she says. Gender for Bornstein is a universe of possibilities, and her work, whether through theater, performance art, or books, encourages everyone to explore their own constellation within it.
But gender theory is not the focus of Hej grymma värld.
This book is about staying alive, through gender confusion, social exile, heartbreak, trauma, and rage. It’s about the courage it takes to try one more thing, even something silly or “wrong,” before giving up completely. And in that sense, it is one of the most quietly radical books ever written on the topic of suicide. It replaces guilt with curiosity. It rejects conformity and prescribes experimentation. It trusts the reader to make their own meaning, and to survive on their own terms.
Bornstein’s current life, alongside her partner Barbara Carrellas in New York City, filled with animals and art, is a quiet testament to what surviving can look like. It’s not always neat. It doesn’t always come with answers. But it comes with the possibility of joy, of community, of contribution.
“The world becomes healthier thanks to its outsiders, outcasts, freaks, queers, and sinners,” Bornstein writes. “I fit into all those categories, so it doesn’t matter to me whether you do or not. Maybe this is a terrible time for you, and if so, I hope I can help you find new courage.”
In the end, Hej grymma värld is a love letter to the unloved, a manifesto for the marginalized, and a stubborn refusal to give up on anyone, not even the reader who already has. Its pages sparkle with irreverence and tenderness, a combination that could only come from someone who has stared down the darkest of nights and decided to keep going anyway.
Bornstein’s book is not afraid to be strange, uncool, or even offensive. It is not afraid to risk being misunderstood. Because at its core, it’s not about being right, it’s about being alive.
Available via Amazon
Photo via Heroines of My Life
Post a Comment