Lina Scheynius Recounts the End of a Relationship

In the winter of 2018, photographer Lina Scheynius’s boyfriend broke up with her via a letter left in the hotel room where they had spent their final days together. It marked the end of an emotionally turbulent, on-again, off-again relationship, and the start of six months of searching diary entries processing everything that had come to pass. These accounts are laid bare in her new book, Diary of an Ending, alongside sharp new essays written five years on from the event. Charting a journey of heartache, desire and eventual healing, the book marks the Swedish photographer’s first venture into prose, and her most personal work to date.

While this may be her first foray into writing in a formal sense, Scheynius has religiously kept a journal since she was ten. Her first diary was a notebook with a flimsy lock and an orange kitten on it – now, she fills leatherbound Moleskines each year. But her camera has been her most enduring mode of self-documentation. Known for the vulnerability with which she has captured the intimacies of her life, body and relationships since the mid-2000s, her luminous images have filled 11 self-published books and appeared on gallery walls in Zurich, Tokyo, Oslo, Berlin and London. 

Scheynius never intended the journal she kept after the breakup to become a book. “I was still feeling really affected by it,” she says, when asked why she returned to the material months later. “I was having flashbacks. I couldn’t trust people. There were a lot of things still troubling me.” The entries are often difficult to read, mapping the unravelling of a corrosive dynamic that, as her therapist later told her, bordered on emotional abuse. They recount memories both tender and cruel – from the sex they had to hundreds of small humiliations; empty promises of children, and, most chillingly, a moment when he said he wished he could put her in a freezer while he decided if he wanted to spend his life with her. “This image sums it all up perfectly,” she writes. “I became more and more passive in my own life as I waited for his decision.”

A year and a half after the letter, she brought the diary to the island of Fårö off the Swedish coast and began the painful process of transcribing it, adding the essay texts through a cold winter in Stockholm in 2024. They balance the immediacy of heartbreak – often penned with a fractured urgency – with powerful reflections on how the relationship affected her, from a place of hindsight. “The first idea was that it was just the diary entries,” she says. “But it was really helpful for me from a processing point of view to go back and put my current voice on the events. Before I wrote the essays, my publisher said, ‘Do you want it to be fiction to not be so exposed?’ And I said, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense with the rest of my work.’ My work is about being vulnerable and exposing sides of myself that are not comfortable to expose all the time.”

The book is interspersed with spectral black and white photographs shot during the freezing Swedish winter when Scheynius wrote the essays in 2024. Images of sunlight streaming through a window, snow-dusted branches, a half-eaten husk of bread left on a table, and the artist at her desk add a quiet, meditative dimension to its emotional passages. “I wanted to keep my ex anonymous, so I didn’t want to include images from that time, which might have been the natural thing to do,” she explains. “I wanted them to be quite abstract.”

Writing, Scheynius says, has not only served as a form of catharsis, but has also expanded her practice as a photographer. “I’m dealing with the same topics, but you can go so much deeper with words,” she says. “Since working on the book I feel bigger, like I have more vocabulary, more ways of understanding things.” This feeling of expansion was aided by writer Saskia Vogel’s translation of the diary texts. “The essays were written in English, but the diary wasn’t,” says Scheynius. “It was fascinating reading her translations. I realised I’m much more polite in English. If I’d translated it myself, I would’ve softened a lot. Saskia kept it true to the Swedish, which is much more direct.”

Both a labour of love and a powerful release, the book has helped Scheynius find her way back to herself. “Two weeks ago, I was in Stockholm and passed by the hotel [where the breakup took place] by accident,” she says. “I felt happy to see it, as it made me think about the book instead. I was even considering taking a selfie outside. Writing the book has helped me a great deal. I feel stronger and like the pain of the relationship has lost its hold on me.”

Diary of an Ending by Lina Scheynius is published by Prototype Publishing, and is out on June 19.