A respected literary critic, poet, and dramatist, Kristina Lugn is a prominent figure in contemporary Swedish culture who attracts an unusually large reading audience. This popularity is partly because of the accessibility of her work with its emphasis on everyday language, easily recognizable characters, and frequent references to popular culture, and also owing to the humor Lugn uses to describe the tragic lives of her protagonists. Focusing on the alienation of the individual in a bourgeois consumer society often controlled by the media, Lugn is an astute critic of contemporary Swedish, and consequently European, culture. In both theme and style, her writing reflects the absurdity of Swedish family life in the 1990s and the psychological chaos it may cause within the individual. In particular Lugn concentrates on the alienation of women who are wrestling with the restrictions of a culturally coded femininity and simultaneously struggling to remain within...