Norway

Norway occupies several roles in Lindy West’s family history: a homeland left behind, a setting of wartime resistance, and a point of departure in a later account of bodily discomfort. Rather than appearing as a single destination, it gathers together different generations’ experiences of separation, endurance, and return imagined but never achieved.

Family Origins and Separation

Ingrid’s parents came from Norway. Clara was the eldest of ten children; after her family homesteaded in North Dakota, the family’s circumstances during the Great Depression became so difficult that her parents sent her back to Norway at eighteen to raise two younger sisters. The journey divided the family across countries and made Clara responsible for children who were not her own. In West’s account, the absence of mothers recurs across Ingrid’s family history: Eleanor, one of the girls sent to the old country, later requested the song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” for her funeral, and it was played.

Norway is also tied to Clara and Ole’s life before they moved to Seattle and raised seven children. Ole had grown up on Gunnersveen, a farm just down the lake. His father died in the 1918 flu pandemic when Ole was nine, and Ingrid recalled that the boys had little childhood. That early loss forms part of the family’s inheritance of hardship, alongside the work and crowded household life that followed their move to the United States.

Occupation and Resistance

In 1945, during the Nazi occupation of Norway, Ole and his brother were among twelve resistance fighters who skied into dark hills to retrieve packages dropped by an Allied spy plane. The bundles contained weapons, radio equipment, and provisions. The episode gives Norway a history of organized resistance in West’s family narrative: Ole’s story is not only one of childhood bereavement and later emigration, but also of taking part in a dangerous effort to recover supplies for the resistance.

A Homeland Remembered from Abroad

After Clara and Ole moved to Seattle, Norway remained present in family life as the country Ole privately wanted to return to. He worked as a carpenter, never quite mastering English, and, as West relates, always wanted to go home. The move therefore did not erase the distinction between the place where the family built its later life and the homeland that continued to draw him in memory.

Norway also enters a separate, bodily register in West’s recollection of air travel. On an eight-hour flight from Oslo to Seattle, she was in tears and feared that the pressure of the plane seat was splintering her femurs. The route connects the country to her account of the physical pain and dread of flying while fat, making Norway both a family setting inherited through stories and the starting point of a sharply personal experience.