Johnnie Walker
An unflinching self-portrait of addiction, writing and the mother who shaped her
On a summer afternoon, sixteen-year-old Connie rides her Vespa across the Maas to a village café called De vriendschap, where no one knows her. She sits down at the bar and orders a whisky. The name she utters will be her inseparable companion and lover for the next forty years: intoxicating, loyal, and determined to destroy her.
The only daughter among three brothers, in a family revolving around a loving but tormented mother, she devotes herself to reading, thinking and writing – a life that allows only one alternative: write or die. The book follows her to the publication of her debut and her meeting with the man who would become the love of her life. It closes decades later, with the death of her mother: in the ambulance, knowing this is the final farewell, she lets Johnnie Walker go.
Along the way, she traces how her obsessions are intertwined: family and fidelity, the men who shaped her, and the question of what turns a person into a murderer, or into a suicide. When the man she loves remarks that the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer could be one of her brothers, she is shaken to the core.
Palmen's sentences are defiant and relentless: Camus, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche sit alongside raw memories, and abstract forces – addiction, grief, shame – take on a will of their own. A fearless dismantling of the self, and of the memoir itself.
The first book in eleven years by one of the Netherlands' leading writers
Winner of the 2026 Constantijn Huygens Prize for her entire oeuvre
Winner of awards including the AKO Literatuurprijs (The Friendship, 1995) and the Libris Literature Prize (Your Story My Story, 2016)
She once again revisits themes from her past work, like a medley of the greatest hits: the formative men from The Laws, a tendency towards profound attachment from The Friendship, the true crime from Lucifer.
NRC
Palmen is one of the Netherlands’ most-loved authors, and with good reason: she is incapable of writing a dull book. There’s always something at stake and, much like her media appearances, she never fails to offer her own, sovereign twist.
Trouw
Johnnie Walker could well have been a long-standing, all-dominating force in Palmen’s existence, yet her style, tone and the power of her words bear no trace. Her style is subtle, robust and precise, with an aloofness that has the miraculous effect of drawing you closer.
Vrij Nederland
Looking through the psychoanalytical lens that characterises her work, Palmen shows compellingly how her obsessions and addictions are interwoven at a deeper level.
Het Parool
