And so it was told that the story of the Mikkola sisters started on the last day of December, on the last day of the millennium, when they were standing in the elevator, heading up to the fourth floor to celebrate New Year’s Eve at Mossutställningar, a temporary freelance-office-slash-art-space run by Hella d’Ailly, who once had been an artist herself, but now was more of a curator-slash-party-arranger.
-- Narrator

Importance: This opening sentence frames the sisters’ lives as something already circulating in rumor, memory, and retelling, which makes the reader attentive to who controls the narrative. The phrase “And so it was told” signals that the book treats story as a social force that shapes reality, not just a record of it. The crowded specificity of the setting also establishes how private choices will unfold inside public spaces where people watch, misread, and repeat what they think they saw. The...