Solace Manuti

Solace Manuti has a double status in Victoria Bergman’s account: she is a real girl from Freetown in Sierra Leone, whose actual name is different, and she also exists inside Victoria as the Helper. Victoria describes needing her, and her diary gives this inward presence the intimacy of a companion who has moved from a wardrobe into the bed. Solace is therefore neither simply an invented friend nor just another name for Victoria; she belongs to the boundary between an actual person and the inner figure through whom Victoria understands her own need for help.

Identity and Double Status

When the therapist asks whether the people Victoria has described are real, Victoria struggles to make the relationships intelligible, saying they are two people who are three people. The therapist does not dismiss the confusion and asks her to describe Solace. Victoria cannot give a full account of her, but eventually says that she needed her. That answer establishes Solace less through appearance or biography than through her function in Victoria’s inner life: she is necessary to her.

Victoria’s account distinguishes the real girl from the figure who lives within her. Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg were real classmates at Sigtuna, but Victoria also recognizes them inside herself as the Worker, the Analyst and Moaning Minnie. Solace, too, is real, though the name Victoria uses is not her real name; within Victoria she is the Helper. The account holds both facts together rather than resolving one into the other. Solace is a person beyond Victoria and, at the same time, a part of the inner arrangement by which Victoria describes herself.

The Helper in Victoria’s Diary

A diary entry dated 3 March gives Solace a more immediate presence. Victoria writes that Solace has moved out of the wardrobe and that they now share a bed. The change in location makes their imagined or inward companionship feel closer: Solace is no longer kept apart in a separate space but is beside Victoria. Victoria also notes that the stench from the sauna has followed them to bed. The entry does not explain the smell or the arrangement in greater detail; instead, its blunt physical detail places Solace within the troubled circumstances Victoria is recording.

The entry is framed by Victoria’s questions about incubation. She wonders whether she is waiting to become ill and whether the period began in Sierra Leone. She believes she carried an infection home and that it remained inside her and made her mad, then calls it his infection. The diary does not establish that Solace caused this illness or explain exactly how she relates to it. What it does show is that Victoria places Solace within a record where illness, memory and inner experience overlap, and where an image of something carried inside becomes a way of describing what has not gone away.

Therapy and the Language of Safety

Solace enters conversations with the therapist, who asks Victoria whether she wants to describe her. Victoria’s difficulty answering contrasts with the confidence of her brief declaration that she needed Solace. She may be unable to define the figure, but she can name her importance. The therapist’s questions give Victoria room to approach that importance without requiring her to settle every uncertainty about what is real.

Victoria likewise describes the therapist indirectly, preferring not to use her name and concentrating instead on her eyes. In the diary, those eyes make her feel safe; Victoria says she can also be herself in them. This account places the therapy relationship alongside her account of Solace, but does not make the two figures interchangeable. Solace is the Helper within Victoria’s inner world; the therapist is the person whose attentive presence makes it possible for Victoria to speak about that world. When Victoria says Solace has moved into the bed, the entry conveys closeness, while the sessions make that closeness available for examination.

Narrative Significance

Solace’s importance lies in the book’s refusal to treat Victoria’s account as a simple choice between a real person and a fabricated one. The narrative supplies both a girl in Freetown, living under another name, and an inner Helper called Solace Manuti. Victoria’s own language preserves the tension: she can say that Solace is real and that Solace is inside her, without making the two statements cancel each other out. Her uncertainty is part of the account, not a puzzle the therapist immediately removes.

The diary’s plain details—the wardrobe, the shared bed, the sauna’s lingering stench—give a concrete setting to an experience Victoria otherwise describes through shifting identities and metaphors of infection. Solace’s role as Helper also stands out among Victoria’s named inner figures: Victoria says she needs her, even while describing other parts as ones that must be removed and identifying the Sleepwalker as the part she must cultivate. The surviving account offers no separate history of Solace’s life in Freetown and no resolution of the difference between the girl and Victoria’s inner companion. Its significance rests instead on that unresolved coexistence, and on the need Victoria can express even when description fails her.