A TALE OF TWO DAUGHTERS

When Greta Thunberg took her climate-change stance, only her parents knew she’d been mute and depressed. But as she flourished her sister began showing worrying symptoms. Here her parents reveal how their ordeal almost tore the family apart

- LOUISE CARPENTER

IT WAS 20 August 2018, the first day of Greta Thunberg’s school strike to protest against climate change, and her parents were worried – not about the response she would draw as she stood alone with her placard outside the Swedish parliament, but rather about how much of her bean and pasta packed lunch she’d eat.

They desperately wanted her to devour the entire thing but knew she probably wouldn’t.

Despite Greta’s growing influence since that first morning when she climbed on her bike and cycled off to parliament, for her parents the campaign for global zero emissions has always been second to wanting their child to be well again.

This is the message that comes through loud and clear in the family’s memoir, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis*, which is being released in English for the first time.

In November 2014, hospitalisation at the Sachsska Children’s Hospital had been imminent. Greta was 11. The emergency unit of the Stockholm Centre for Eating Disorders had identified that she was showing signs of starvation.

Her blood pressure and pulse had plummeted. She wasn’t eating – out of confusion, depression and as yet undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome. She went without food for two months before realising she’d have to eat to avoid hospital admittance.

Greta had “disappeared into a darkness”, her parents, Malena Ernman and Svante Thunberg, recall. She was bullied at school. She stopped laughing and playing the piano. She cried all the time – at night when she should’ve been sleeping, and at school, in class and during her breaks.