Mirjam Hagen spent fifty years surviving. Her new memoir is about building a home

“I grew up believing that home was a place you survived. It took me more than fifty years to understand that home is something we create.”

That is the opening of The Empty Chair: Becoming the Home I Spent My Life Looking For, the new memoir from Norwegian author Mirjam Hagen, and the closest she can come to describing her turning point.

As a child in a tall concrete high-rise in Norway, she learned to listen for footsteps before she learned to trust silence. As an adult she raised five children through poverty, illness and fear, telling herself that strength meant carrying everything alone.

What changed things was not one great moment. “It was ordinary choices, made again and again: getting out of bed, asking for help, starting over,” she says. Slowly she understood that survival was never the destination, and that the real work comes afterwards.

One of those choices was to put her story on paper. She worked on the book's launch through My First Solo Audio Book, a programme run by Marco Robinson.

The memoir runs to thirteen chapters and is due to be published before Christmas 2026. Its title carries her closing thought. “An empty chair does not always mean someone is missing,” she writes. “Sometimes it means someone is still welcome.”

To anyone standing at the edge of starting over, she offers no easy answers. “You don't have to see the whole road. You only have to take the next step.”

Heroic Breaking News is run by Marco Robinson, founder of the Start Over Movement.