Christian Jungersen

Christian Jungersen is a Danish writer who has been published in more than 20 countries. His novels are Undergrowth, The Exception, and You Disappear. All of them have won major literary prizes and become bestsellers.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

You Disappear explores how a brain injury can transform a person you thought you knew into a stranger. How did you research this? What surprised you in the research?

I got the idea for the book because I have an old school friend who’s now a psychiatrist. Whenever we would meet, I would hear stories from her work, and it struck me that her way of looking at people was very different from what I’m used to seeing in fiction. The kind of knowledge she has simply doesn’t inform fictional descriptions of people. Besides of course writing a page-turner readers would find relevant and thought provoking, I wanted to write a novel that tried to modernize the way we conceive of people in literature.

As part of my research, I got to know a variety of brain-damaged people and their families. I worked on this novel for almost five years, and several of these family members became my friends. I’ve grown quite close to some of them, and they’ve shared private details about living with someone who suffers from brain damage, details that I don’t think they’ve even shared with their best friends.

In the course of five years, this neurological world became my world. I traveled around hospitals and visited one expert after the other. The novel also features...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Christian Jungersen's website.

The Page 69 Test: You Disappear.

--Marshal Zeringue