Alex’s brother Calle Schulman appears in the podcast “Nightmare Guest”.
And it gets really hard.
– A brother comes with a lifelong feeling of betrayal, then it’s something else. Maybe you shouldn’t make entertainment out of that, says Alex Schulman in the episode.
In Alex Schulman and Sigge Eklund’s podcast “The Nightmare Guest” the point is that the guests should be uncomfortable. In the past, for example, the TV profiler Morgan Alling has been there and confronted the podcast profiles after they cheated on him.
This week’s episode will be even more difficult for Alex Schulman, 49 – as Sigge Eklund has secretly invited his brother Calle Schulman, 45.
The conversation develops into an emotional review of the brothers’ childhood. And things Calle believes Alex is either misremembering or lying about. For example, the mother’s alcoholism, which Alex Schulman wrote about in the book “Forget me” in 2016.
Alex Schulman and Sigge Eklund.
Photo: ANNA-KARIN NILSSON
The brothers have completely different views of how much of the mother’s life was marked by drinking.
– You don’t think that 98 percent of my mother was an alcoholic, asks Calle Schulman in the podcast.
– I hope you don’t maintain that mother’s alcoholism is two percent of her person, replies Alex.
– You mean there is more?
– Yes, it’s probably 98 percent, says Alex.
“You remember wrong”
Calle Schulman thinks it’s “such a damn simple, analog picture of it”.
– In my world, it was the alcoholism that made her unable to function as a mother to us, says Alex Schulman and continues:
– But it’s clear, maybe it wasn’t. I remember when she got sober and was still a pretty mean person. It was a bit of a shock to me. I thought that when she got sober she would stand with open arms and say sorry, but that never happened.
Alex and Calle Schulman both believe that through the book “Forget Me” Alex “stole the narrative” of their childhood.
– I have a lot of respect for that, says Alex Schulman in “The Nightmare”.
For a period, when Calle Schulman was around 15, the family lived in Bua in Halland. Here, too, the brothers’ memories differ considerably. Alex says he also lived there with his family, but Calle says:
– You have not lived in Bua. You were there for a visit. During these four or five years you were there, what? Ten times?
– You remember wrongly, says Alex Schulman.
“The knees and calves were bloody”
Later, Calle plays a clip from a podcast where Alex says he was locked in an underground cellar by his brother. According to Calle, that was not how it happened at all.
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– You locked me in, says Calle.
– I broke the entire door lining out of fear in there.
– I have told you about it once. You either took it in and stole it or took it in, processed it and made yourself the victim.
The next thing the brothers disagree about: Alex Schulman claims that at one point the mother sat and hit herself on the leg with a stick of wood.
– Why would she have fought? That sounds like a real little fabrication actually, says Calle Schulman.
“Very simple in the brain”
At the end, Alex Schulman questions the entire episode.
– There is a bit of an ambush feeling and I hold that against both of you a bit.
The author thinks that it is not possible to “make entertainment” out of a conversation of this type.
– I didn’t know it was entertainment, answers Calle.
– This is a very good programme, says Sigge Eklund.
Alex Schulman:
– But that’s what I mean. That you talk about a “good program”, you don’t understand what this really is. You are very simple now in the brain in a way that almost amazes me. You cannot talk about this conversation as a “good program”.
