If you like long novels about families slouching toward their doom, marriage as a “life catastrophe,” and reconciliations that come fifty-years late if at all, then you may already know that writer and director Ingmar Bergman turned to novels at one point in his life to overcome the “perfectionist restriction” he felt in his film work.

He wrote the three autobiographical novels [following his autobiography] in a remarkable creative rush between the ages of seventy-three and seventy-eight. The Best Intentions, a dramatization of his parents’ improbable courtship and troubled marriage that’s punctuated by conversations (real or imagined) with Erik and Karin (referred to in the novel by the pseudonyms “Anna” and “Henrik”) in their old age, came out in 1991; Sunday’s Children, which focuses on a precarious moment in the young Ingmar’s relationship with his forbidding father, in 1993; and Private Confessions, a series of six brief stories, each featuring his mother at a crucial moment in her emotional and spiritual life, in 1996.^*