The game’s up, David. I know you haven’t lost your memory. I know you remember most of what we have spent time and energy on recounting and writing down and then sending to the email address you gave in your advertisement. You see I was speaking to my grandson on the phone yesterday evening and when I told him what I was doing at the moment he said he was afraid we’d been conned. My grandson is part of an artists’ group in Trondheim and apparently there has been some discussion within the group as to whether your latest book project is morally defensible or not. I didn’t even know that you were a published author, but it turns out that you are and according to what my grandson has heard your alleged memory loss is part of a new, autobiographical book project you’re working on. Apparently writing autobiographies is all the rage at the moment and word has it that you’re trying to put a new twist on the traditional personal history by looking at your own life through the eyes of others. He wasn’t really sure about this, he said, but you definitely hadn’t lost your memory, because he had run into you on the street the day before and there had been nothing then to indicate any such thing. You had recognized him straight away and stopped for a chat as you usually did when the two of you met.

Obviously I should have realized that there was something suspicious about all this. Obviously I’ve been stupid and naive. And now that I know what’s been going on I can see how incredible and how unlikely it would have been for someone to lose their memory and then put an ad in the newspaper to find out who they are. There can only be one explanation for why I didn’t immediately grasp the incredibility and unlikelihood of this situation, and that is that I find it even more incredible and unlikely that anyone could be capable of doing such a thing to their fellow human beings. It’s one thing to be so ineffably self-centred as to take it for granted that I and other people have nothing better to do than to spend their evenings writing about you. Individualism, egotism and self-promotion – these are, after all, the very hallmarks of your generation, so to some extent I can understand it. You are as much a product of your time as most people are, I suppose. But that you can exploit other people’s concern for a fellow human being as you have done, exploit their compassion and encourage them to expose themselves and others, exploit the good in them to provide you with character sketches and descriptions of all and sundry, and put it all into a book; that you could do something like that speaks of a cynicism beyond my comprehension. How do you think Paula will feel when she learns that you are planning to make public all the private, sensitive and intimate details she has been willing to share with you? Do you realize how hard and how painful it was for her simply to lend her diaries to me? True, she stapled together pages that she absolutely did not want anyone else to read, but still, she did not do it gladly, I can assure you. And then to have to see it made public. Published, in a book, and not to serve the purpose she has always believed it was meant to serve. There she was, thinking that she was helping a man in need, only to find that she has been used, sponged on, spat upon. Oh yes, you have spat upon her kindness and goodwill, that’s what you’ve done. It’s disgraceful. The idea, its execution, this whole project of yours is disgraceful and my greatest regret is that I have sent you each part of her story as I wrote it down. If only I had decided to wait until we were completely finished then you wouldn’t have heard a word from us. Then Paula could have rested easier. Granted, she would have had to live with the fact that she had confided in me, but at least she wouldn’t have had to suffer what you are clearly dead set on subjecting her to. Tell me, have you completely forgotten what it was like to grow up in a community as small as that on Otterøya? Have you any idea what all this will cost Paula and probably a lot of the other people who have sent you information that was meant for you and you alone? Have you any idea how disastrous it can be for a person to have everyone made privy to their innermost and most private thoughts? To have everyone learn what they really think and feel about people close to them or whom they see every day? Friendships can be ruined by such things, relationships shattered and marriages broken, relatives become estranged, whole lives destroyed, don’t you realize that? Don’t you realize what a responsibility you are taking upon yourself if you go ahead with this? Are you really willing to do this simply in order to publish a book about yourself?

I don’t know if what you are doing is illegal. Probably not. These days anything goes, it seems. But it is most definitely immoral and all I can do now is to appeal to the little in the way of conscience that you may have and beg you not to complete this utterly narcissistic project of yours and not to use the information we have sent you. If, on the other hand, you decide to continue, I will of course contact the press and television stations and inform them of the suffering you are inflicting on other people. You may well be too cold and cynical to care about that, but by contacting the media I can at least prevent more people from making the same mistake as us.

I hope to hear from you as soon as you have read this. Now I have to drive up to the care home to inform Paula and all the others of my discovery. This is not something I am looking forward to.