You expect a certain fragility, and at first encounter, she does not disappoint. Her skin, pale as a plate of milk, is translucent, and against the clatter of the Stockholm coffee shop, she speaks tentatively, as if testing whether the words can bear her weight. Despite the blazer and jeans, she would not look out of place rising from the mist in some Arthurian legend or collapsing onto a Victorian fainting couch. But ask her if she sees herself as weak and Linda Boström Knausgård is unequivocal.

“I am a strong person,” she says emphatically, chuckling a little at her own vehemence. It is the answer of someone accustomed to contending with the slow poison of other people’s assumptions.

Questions of strength and weakness have hovered around Boström Knausgård ever since the novelist with whom she shares a last name wrote, in rather excruciating detail, about their life together and Boström Knausgård’s mental illness. But they also figure prominently in her own work. In Welcome to America, Boström Knausgård’s second novel, which was awarded Sweden’s prestigious August Prize and came out in the U.S. on September 3, she tells a piercing story of a girl who responds to trauma by mustering the most powerful weapon available to her: silence. Because the novel—like her other fiction—draws closely from its author’s past, it will surely invite comparison with My Struggle, by her former husband, Karl Ove Knausgaard. But it is perhaps more accurate—and certainly more interesting—to think of Welcome to America as an assertion of Boström Knausgård’s own strengths, both personal and literary.

“Almost everything in it happened in real life,” she says. “But it’s not autobiography.” In Welcome to America, 11-year-old Ellen stops speaking after her father dies, a death the girl believes she provoked by praying to God for it. She maintains her silence for months, eliciting the concern of all around her, but also, through force of will, upending the lives of her mother and brother. “We were standing on either side of a trench, measuring out a distance between us. Or perhaps we were measuring each other,” she writes. “Who was the stronger? Who was weak? Who would come creeping in the night, sobbing and reaching out to be held?”

There is a lot of herself in Ellen, Boström Knausgård, 46, says. As a child in Stockholm, she recalls herself as a lonely, watchful girl who, like her protagonist, didn’t want to grow up. “Riding horses, swimming, being with my friends—I wanted it to be like that forever,” she says. “I would look at adults and think, What’s that thing that happens to them?”

Certainly the adults around her didn’t make it easy. She adored her mother, Ingrid Boström, who died in August and who, like Ellen’s in Welcome to America, was an accomplished actor, radiant and loving but also insistently sunny in a way that, in the novel, feels at times oppressive. In real life, the author says, she didn’t find her mother domineering, although she admits that as a teenager she chose to be confirmed precisely so she could drop the “Ingrid” from her name.“She was as little a narcissist as an actress can be,” she says of her mother, arching a knowing eyebrow. “There are far more narcissistic people. But she was always very busy. And it was the ’70s; parents were more self-absorbed then.”

Still, she yearned to be near her, and would spend long hours at the theater watching her mother rehearse. Eventually that fascination inspired Boström Knausgård to apply to one of Sweden’s most prestigious drama schools herself. She made it through all the preliminary rounds, only to be disqualified in the final audition. During the long train ride home, she was so disappointed by her failure to gain admission that when another passenger in the car began screaming for unknown reasons, Boström Knausgård wondered if somehow the cries weren’t coming from her own wounded soul. But when she arrived back at the family apartment, an envelope was waiting for her. “It had my acceptance to writing school,” she says. “It was destiny.”

There were darker destinies as well. In Welcome to America, Ellen is too young to give a name to the illness that drives her father, in the throes of mania, to force her to sit in place all night, listening to him sing a favorite song, until she wets herself, but Boström Knausgård is not. “My father was bipolar,” she says. “When he was doing well, he could be really nice. But he was a threat when he wasn’t. I found him very frightening during those times. I couldn’t defend myself against him.” Like Ellen, she prayed for his death, and although he survived her youthful petitions, she still felt a modicum of responsibility when, several years ago, he passed away. “In our last conversation we had a row, and I worry about the impact that it had,” she recalls. “He wanted me to deny something, and I said, ‘No, it’s true, I’m not going to say that it’s not.’ He died a week after that.”