In the internationally bestselling and award-winning Woman at 1,000 Degrees, which has been published in fourteen languages, noted Icelandic novelist Hallgrímur Helgason has created a true literary original. In this essay, he explains how he came upon the story — and the fascinating woman — behind it.

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Being a novelist is a bit like being a doctor, a journalist, or a firefighter. At work or not, you always have to be ready.

In the spring of 2006, municipal elections were held in Iceland. I was living in Reykjavík with a woman who had just entered politics, and she asked me to help out her party in the campaign. I went down to the headquarters of the Icelandic Social Democratic Party and joined their team of volunteers. They handed me a list of phone numbers and told me to ask people to vote for the Social Democrats. I started calling and it was going well, until I got an elderly lady on the line who told me flat out that she would never vote for “those damned communists.”

Still, she got to me, with her honesty, stubbornness, and clever humor. I was curious and started chatting with her.

She turned out to be an eighty-year-old woman who was bedridden by a lung disease and living in a garage all by herself. She had been living there for over a decade. The garage did not belong to her family — she just rented it from strangers. Yet, she was not isolated at all: she had satellite TV and a PC. She was constantly watching news channels, movies, and historical documentaries, all while being online around the clock, communicating with people all over the world. She even ran her own language school, teaching Icelandic to young men in Argentina and Malaysia. (I later learned that one of her students showed up in Iceland and wanted to visit her “school,” but got the answer from her that it was “closed for summer.”) At one point she explained to me the difference between Yahoo and Google, informing me that Yahoo was “a much better search machine.”

I was blown away by this fascinating woman, by her no-bullshit attitude and the original way she described her life. I ended up talking to her for almost an hour, wrote down her name, and seriously thought of visiting her in the garage.

For two years I could not stop thinking about her. I was fascinated by the idea of someone who was completely cut off from the world but still a participant in it. For me she was almost like a human god, invisible and above, but still very active and omnipresent.

  Maybe here was an idea for a novel? At least it was a wonderful setting. When I had finished the book I was writing (The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning), I finally decided to check up on the woman in the garage. I had forgotten her name and could not find the piece of paper where I had written it down, and I had only a vague idea of the street where she lived.

After some phone calls, I sadly found out that she had passed away in 2007. I had missed the chance to meet her. But I would always remember our conversation. I was desperate to find out more about her.

I discovered that she had once been a prominent figure in Icelandic society, and that her family was one of the best known in the land. Her grandfather had been elected the first president of Iceland, when we gained our independence from Denmark in the summer of 1944, and her father had fought on the side of the Nazis in World War II, a fatal decision that had been kept as a state secret in the decades after the war. This dark chapter in the life of the president’s son had also affected his daughter’s life a little too much. It had uprooted her childhood, forcing her to live with strangers on a foreign island during the war, and sent her to South America after it was over. She never found home again, until she made the garage her home.

By making calls for the Social Democrats that day in 2006, I had stumbled upon a remarkable story, a story that would enable me to write a broad historical novel that would take the reader from the innocent but primitive times of prewar Iceland to the continental horrors of World War II, to Germany, Argentina, France, and the affluent years of postwar Iceland, all the way to the garage.

But first and foremost, circumstance had presented me with an incredible character, a larger-than-life woman whom I have tried to do justice in Woman at 1,000 Degrees. I named this heroine Herra Bjornsson. In Icelandic, Herra is both a woman’s name and our word for “mister.” As Herra sits in her garage with a laptop computer and a hand grenade, recalling the events of her magnificent life, she decides that when she dies she will be cremated — at the temperature of 1,000 degrees.

Yes, this story was inspired by real events and people, but in the end it is a work of fiction, taking all the necessary liberties to make a good story even better.

Writers, beware: sometimes your next book is only a phone call away.

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