When I meet Sigrid Rausing, she has just returned to London from a short book tour to her native Sweden and is still somewhat in between worlds. The previous evening, she had been the headline act at an event in Lund, her home town, involving a distinguished Swedish poet, a local folk group and the son of a wartime Nazi who had also written a book. The audience consisted largely of a swim of once-familiar faces, friends of her parents she knew in childhood, like a bar scene from a subtitled box set. She is not necessarily a natural on-stage performer, she suggests, and the evening, a long one, had a curious dream-like quality from which, the following afternoon in her rooftop office where she sits in the sunshine in a shirt she has borrowed from her husband, shaking sense into her head and giggling occasionally, she is still struggling to emerge.
You imagine that plenty of Rausing's life has something of that surreal cast. She is among the wealthiest women in Britain, third generation of the empire based on the patenting of Tetra Pak by her grandfather, Ruben, which revolutionised the way dairy products were packaged across the world. She lives partly in Aubrey House, a discreet historic mansion in Holland Park (when she bought it 17 years ago the most expensive house in London) and partly on a farm in Sussex.
She owns the publishing house Granta, has recently taken over the editing of its famous eponymous literary quarterly, and runs a foundation that gives away about £22m a year to more than 100 organisations across the world that support human rights. She also works hard, it seems, to remain sane and make the strangeness normal.
Her book, perhaps, represents her more extreme efforts in that regard. Everything is Wonderful is a memoir of a year Rausing spent in 1993 living on a collective farm in Estonia, a year that formed the fieldwork component of a PhD in anthropology she completed in London. It is a curiously involving account, written with great attention to memory and to the detail of place and person, which quietly creates a profound portrait of a lost European world. You are reminded, partly because of the circumstance of the recollection, of the descriptive clarities of Isak Dinesen, but without the high sentimental drama; it's like Babette's Feast, I noted at one point, before the feast.
Rausing was 31 at the time she went to Estonia. It was three years before her father, Hans, sold his half-share of the family firm to his brother, Gad, for a reported £3.5bn. She lived for 12 months – half of them in subzero temperatures – without hot water in a shared flat, taking assiduous notes about the lives of the Swedish-speaking villagers who had found themselves on the wrong side of history – two world wars, Nazi and Soviet occupations – and were now facing up to the sudden shock of independence and a market economy.
The collective fields had been abandoned with the latest revolution. Exiles were returning on the Stockholm ferry to claim lost land. There was nothing to buy, or even to steal, but there was a lot about the spirit of the community Rausing found welcoming, its ingrained support mechanisms, its shared memory and indifference to material wealth. The Tetra Pak heiress came home with a single souvenir, the glass milk bottle she had been given on the day of her arrival, which she had used for a year, having it filled most mornings at the local store from a vat under the shop counter. She planned to use it back in London, but of course that never happened.
She doesn't see it like this, but one neat reading of her life would place the Estonian year as a rite of passage, the point at which she grew up to accept both the possibilities and responsibilities of her fortune. Rausing had lived fairly anonymously as a student at York University after she first came to Britain in her teens. She'd travelled a lot, including a three-month road trip across America at 17 with a friend and without a driving licence.
She had maintained her low profile as the family became more prominent in her 20s. She mentions in the book the comedy of the fact that initially the collective farmers thought she had changed her name to Rausing from Van Rosen, the family name of their old landowner, and was in the village undercover to check out her ancestral homeland. They discovered the even more unlikely reality of her story about halfway through the year, she believes, but no one ever asked her about it.
Was that anonymity part of the attraction of going in the first place? I wonder. "I liked the idea of it certainly. I still like that idea."
Did you like it more so when you were younger? "No, I have always liked it. I really like it now."
The real surprise or satisfaction to her about that year, she suggests, was how at home she was in this alien place. "I had the same kind of name that they had," she says. "I looked like them. I was more or less dressed like them. I am a minority Swede here in Britain as they were mostly minority Swedes there. Being in another language that is not your mother tongue, and yet having a mother tongue inside you, is quite a binding thing. The Swedes there were all old. Many of them hadn't spoken Swedish very much at all since their childhoods until I came. The memories came back with the language."
She pieced together her own former self from the diaries she kept and from returning to the volumes of field notes and interviews that formed the basis of her PhD and subsequent academic book. Rereading the diaries, she says: "I was struck by how tentative I was. The academic book of course is a lot more certain. In this, though, all the certainty is gone."
Her tutor at the time, Daniel Miller, described field work to her as a process of self-discovery, as well as discovery of another culture by total immersion. She isn't so sure. She stuck it out mostly through intellectual determination, a family trait – her mother was a professor of medieval German, her father a Russian scholar, who, among his achievements, made Tetra Pak the most successful exporter to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. For a while, Rausing saw her own future in academia, but that changed after her Estonian adventure.
"Other things happened," she says. "I literally finished my PhD dissertation the day I was due to give birth to my son and I didn't go back to anthropology after that." Her first marriage, to Dennis Hotz, a South African publisher and art dealer, ended in divorce. She married Eric Abraham, the film producer whose credits include the Academy Award-winning drama Kolya, in 2003.
After the fog of early motherhood, Rausing devoted herself to establishing the various charities and projects she already supported within a coherent private foundation. Her grantees she says, reflect her politics, which were given substance in her eastern European year off. "I have always been a liberal without being remotely interested in party politics," she says now. "I have always believed in engagement rather than boycotts and I have tried to be very involved in human rights.
"In repressive societies, not just dissidents but everyone suffers. One of the things that was very poignant to me in Estonia was seeing the returning exiles from Sweden visit their families who had stayed behind. The people who had grown up in Sweden were, on the whole, inches taller, had all their own teeth, looked 10 years younger than their contemporaries. The people who had stayed in Estonia were so marked by the life they had endured."
I wonder if living without money for a year helped her to work out her relationship with her wealth? "Well," she says, "we didn't particularly have wealth when I was growing up. We had a company. So it was more like having a line of credit. And I didn't necessarily have the prospect of it, because my father might have decided not to sell the company."
If nothing else, she suggests, it certainly impressed on her the need to have a determinedly outward-facing life. The price of moving in the opposite direction was also becoming all too vivid. All the while Rausing was committing to her life of careful engagement, her beloved brother, Hans Kristian, was retreating from it. After a long public struggle with drug dependency, Hans Kristian, a father of four, reached a hellish place in July 2012 when he was arrested on suspicion of possessing Class A drugs. A search of his home in Belgravia revealed the body of his wife, Eva, behind a locked door in an upstairs room. Eva, also an addict, had died of a heart attack two months earlier.
Writing about those horrific events in the months that followed, in an effort to help raise awareness of addiction, Rausing detailed her own sense of failure and grief. "I watched my brother and Eva decline, gripped by a vice, or a desire, beyond their control," she wrote. "For us, their family, the sadness of their relapse was overwhelming. Their addiction became our project, a project of endless emails, phone calls, experts, meetings, strategies, agreements, disagreements. Every week brought a new crisis, new information and new developments. But most of all I remember the sadness." It was, of course, almost impossible to put into words the final chapter of that relapse. "Out of all the tragic endings we imagined," she concluded, "– and there were many – we never imagined this."
Nearly two years on, she has no real wish to add to those thoughts. "Everyone who has addiction in the family I think will recognise this," she says. "You are drawn into a kind of vortex of co-dependency. The trying to fix it. Addiction is a very mysterious existential condition and up close it is very hard to understand."
She came to think of her brother's descent, she says, as "something like CS Lewis's theory of evil – small incremental steps. I think you learn to be an addict step by step and suddenly you are an addict. It is who you become, your identity."
In the last years and months before Eva's death, she had become an unwelcome visitor to the house, which now pains her as much as anything.
"I didn't want to distance myself. I was very close to my brother. You try to help but from the point of view of the addict any help is viewed as a threat. You are moving the addict away from what he wants. They are extremely protective of that."
One of her strategies to help cope with the very public shock of that tragedy, she says, has been to throw herself even more wholeheartedly into work. The book is part of that, a reconnection with her younger self. And last year, after a series of resignations and upheavals at Granta in which several of her senior editors left, Rausing took over most of the editorial responsibilities herself. Was that partly, in the circumstances, something she welcomed?
"Maybe," she says. "I have always liked hard work. But I think the fact that my family was going through this incredible trauma that culminated in Eva's death and my brother doing what he did, I think that gave a necessary space for work in my life. There was a sense of refuge."
By the end of last summer, Granta had gone from 34 employees to 22; it had also won a clutch of awards, including the Man Booker prize for Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. Rausing has enthusiastic plans to build on that success, plans she would rather talk about than anything else. She has been acting editor of the literary magazine for six months but the next issue will see her drop the temporary nature of that title. "You can't be acting for ever," she says, in what might be a more general statement of her philosophy over the years. "Eventually you have to step forward." She approaches that prospect with some apprehension, she admits, but also great determination.
