Åsa Roxberg’s book I ingen-mans-land: att leva i skuggan av en hemlighet is a quiet, unsettling, and deeply necessary work, precisely because it refuses the simplifications that so often surround stories of gender transition. Instead of centring the narrative on the person who transitions, Roxberg turns our attention to the one who stands beside, the spouse who must somehow continue to exist while the shared life she believed in dissolves, reshapes itself, or vanishes altogether. This shift in perspective makes the book both painful and invaluable, because it exposes the emotional terrain that is usually left unexplored, the landscape inhabited by partners, children, and families who are expected to be understanding, supportive, and strong, often all at once.
The story of the Roxberg family begins when Åke Roxberg, a priest in the Church of Sweden, tells his family that he is in fact a woman. He is transsexual, meaning that he experiences his gender identity as female, and he later becomes Ann-Christine Ruuth. Long before this revelation, there had been what the family referred to as “the Secret”, the knowledge that Åke liked to wear women’s clothes. That secret, while significant, was something the family learned to live with. It existed in the background, contained, unspoken, managed. When Åke finally articulated that he was not simply a man who cross-dressed, but a woman who had lived her life in disguise, the ground shifted completely. What had once been manageable became overwhelming, not only emotionally but socially, spiritually, and existentially.
One of the aspects that made this situation especially complex was Åke’s role as a parish priest. The question was no longer confined to the private sphere of marriage and family life. It expanded outward into the congregation, the diocese, and the Church of Sweden as an institution. Can a priest be transsexual. What does the church say. What will the parish think. And perhaps most painfully of all, what will the family endure. These questions were not abstract. They had immediate consequences for careers, reputations, relationships, and identities. For Åsa Roxberg, this meant that her husband’s coming out did not only challenge her marriage, it challenged the very framework through which she understood herself and her life.
In I ingen-mans-land, Roxberg writes from within this fracture. Her voice is marked by doubt, grief, loyalty, and a persistent sense of inadequacy. She describes the pain of hearing her husband say that he regretted marrying, not specifically her, but marriage as such. Even when framed as a general regret, those words cut deeply, because they undermined the shared narrative of love, choice, and commitment that had sustained her for decades. The book does not dramatise this pain for effect. Instead, it lingers in it, allowing the reader to feel how such statements echo and reverberate inside a long marriage, especially when the marriage is already under existential strain.
What makes Roxberg’s account so powerful is that it does not position her as either hero or victim. She does not deny her initial instinct to support her husband, nor does she romanticise it. What begins as a self-evident desire to stand by the person she loves soon becomes the starting point of a profound crisis. Who am I without the life we built together. What happens to my identity, my future, my sense of meaning. These questions are not rhetorical. They are lived questions, and Roxberg shows how slowly, and painfully, they unfold over time.
The book’s title, In No Man’s Land, captures this state with devastating precision. Åsa finds herself in a space where old definitions no longer apply, but new ones have not yet formed. She is not the wife she was, but she is not yet something else. She is expected to be understanding, but her own grief has no clear place. In public discourse, stories of transition are often framed as journeys toward authenticity and freedom. Roxberg does not dispute that truth, but she insists on another truth alongside it, that one person’s liberation can coincide with another person’s loss, and that both realities deserve to be acknowledged.
This is why the book is so urgent. Too many people believe that transition is simply a matter of “changing gender” and then everything falls into place. Roxberg shows, with painful clarity, that it is rarely that simple. Transition affects entire relational systems. It reshapes marriages, parent-child relationships, social networks, and professional lives. Yet the voices of those who stand close to the transitioning person are rarely heard. Children, spouses, parents, and siblings are often expected to process their emotions quietly, so as not to appear unsupportive or reactionary. I ingen-mans-land breaks that silence.
There is a line in the book that encapsulates much of its emotional core, “Sometimes it is not love that ends, but the possibility of living within it.” This sentence captures the tragedy of relationships that are not destroyed by lack of affection, but by incompatible realities. Roxberg’s story is not about rejecting her husband’s truth. It is about the cost of that truth for her own life, and about the slow, uncertain work of finding a way forward when the future you imagined no longer exists.
Importantly, Roxberg’s narrative also resonates with the broader story of the Roxberg family, which became widely known through her daughter Ester Roxberg’s book Min pappa Ann-Christine, later adapted into the successful film Min pappa Marianne starring Rolf Lassgård. While Ester’s book tells the story from a child’s perspective, Åsa’s book offers the counterpoint, the adult, spousal perspective, equally nuanced and equally painful. Together, these works form a rare, multi-voiced account of what it means when a parent transitions, not just for themselves, but for everyone around them.This multi-perspective understanding is further enriched when placed alongside Ann-Christine Roxberg’s own reflections, such as those expressed in her 2014 interview for The Heroines of My Life. In that conversation, Ann-Christine speaks openly about faith, fear, silence, and love, emphasising that her journey was never about rebelling against God, but about trusting in divine love. She describes how her belief that God loves her exactly as she is gave her the courage to live openly, even as she acknowledges the fear and prejudice she encountered, including within the church. Her words illuminate the inner necessity of her transition, while Åsa’s book illuminates its relational consequences. Read together, these voices resist easy moral binaries. There is no villain here, only human beings trying to survive a truth that arrived too late to be painless.
Åsa Roxberg’s professional background adds another layer of depth to the book. Born in 1953, she is a nurse and professor of caring science, with a long academic career focused on suffering, consolation, dignity, and existential perspectives in healthcare. She has taught and researched at several Swedish and Norwegian universities, including VID University College in Bergen and Högskolan Väst. Her scholarly work on suffering and its alleviation, including in the aftermath of natural disasters, informs her writing in subtle but unmistakable ways. She understands suffering not as something to be fixed quickly, but as something that must be acknowledged, named, and lived through with dignity.
This sensitivity permeates I ingen-mans-land. Roxberg does not seek quick resolutions. She allows ambivalence to exist. She writes about loyalty and betrayal, shame and survival, grief and endurance. She asks what it means to stay, and what it means to leave, and whether there is ever a morally pure choice in situations like this. She also writes about the slow emergence of a new language for herself, a new footing, a tentative beginning that does not erase the past but learns to coexist with it.
Ultimately, I ingen-mans-land is not primarily a book about gender identity. It is a book about what it means to stand beside someone undergoing a transformation so profound that it destabilises everything around it. It is about the cost of truth, the limits of love, and the courage required to rebuild a self when the old one no longer fits. By giving voice to a perspective that is so often marginalised, Åsa Roxberg has written a book that is as uncomfortable as it is necessary, as painful as it is compassionate. It reminds us that real life rarely conforms to slogans, and that understanding requires listening to all the voices involved, not just the loudest or most celebrated ones.
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