It’s the summer of 1985, and Sigrid feels that she finally has greater freedom. Her ailing father has finally been given a room in a nursing home, and her children have set up their own lives in the capital. But when Sigrid starts cleaning out her childhood home, she discovers that the women of the family have hardly left a trace.

In the previous two novels about Sigrid, Line Baugstø explored women’s lives in the 1960s and 70s. The backdrop to Rooms of Their Own is the 1980s and the neo-liberal turn. Everything is about individual freedom, but Sigrid can’t run away from her responsibility for others. The novels about Sigrid revolve around the sense of duty and longing for freedom, absence and presence, and how relationships in a family are always in a state of change.