Det är om dig jag skriver
(You’re the One I Write About)
by Moa Backe Åstot
Reviewed by B.J. Woodstein
You’re a teenager and there’s someone you’re attracted to, but you’re not sure if they like you. You also don’t think other people would approve of your love. To your surprise, it turns out that your crush likes you back, and you begin a secret relationship. But when you try to be more open about it, you face mockery and disapproval, and your crush distances themselves from you. You’re heartbroken and you wish you’d never made yourself vulnerable. You’re the One I Write About explores this emotional reality through a series of brief, emotive poems. The unnamed, ungendered protagonist is quite possibly queer, given the shocked and even disgusted reactions to this relationship, but this is left implicit, so that readers can draw their own conclusions.
Moa Backe Åstot writes with real empathy and understanding, depicting the rollercoaster that is a first relationship. There are thrills and joys, tentative approaches, young passion, and then, sadly, there is the crushing hurt, confusion and sorrow that accompanies rejection and disavowal.
Short poems capture feelings beautifully, such as: ‘but no//I don’t even dare to think/about how disappointed I’ll be//if I dare to hope/for real’ or ‘it is when you/say my name/for the third time today//that I realise that maybe/you aren’t the one who’s hard to reach/and rather I am’ and ‘I kiss you until all the doubt dissipates/until my pulse races and my heart bursts//you kiss me until you sigh/until your hands shake and my back hits the wall’.
Moa Backe Åstot is best known for Himlabrand (Fire from the Sky), a young adult novel about gay love in the Sami community, and is also the author of Fjärilshjärta (Butterfly Heart). She is obviously drawn to stories of complicated human emotions and hasn’t forgotten what it is like to be young. Her latest book is moving and compassion in its portrayal of first love, and people, whether young or old, will recognise themselves in You’re the One I Write About.
Det är om dig jag skriver
Rabén & Sjögren, 2026. 107 pp. ISBN: 9789129752403.
Foreign rights: Salomonsson Agency.
Moa Backe Åstot is a Swedish Sami writer who has been shortlisted for many awards, including the August Prize and the GLLI Translated Young Adult Literature Book Prize, and won others, including the Norrland Literature Prize. Himlabrand was reviewed by Saskia Vogel in SBR 2021:1.