My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My Friends

#1 New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.

Content Tags:

Perfect for readers who want:

• Strong kids from broken families who put each other back together
• Unbreakable friendship bonds
• Love, in all of its many forms (and the sometimes irrational things we do for it)
• Heartwarming story about the ways our lives impact others (sometimes unexpectedly)
• Art as a way of connection and healing
• Older protagonists, oftentimes reminiscing (offset by younger characters . . . making their own mistakes in the moment, of course)
• Poignant, relatable writing that tugs at the heartstrings
• A story that unfolds a little bit at a time

Overall

Fredrik Backman is easily one of my all-time favorite authors, so I’m always eager to get my hands on his next release. My Friends was obviously no exception. I’ll admit that when I first read the blurb, it did not sound like my sort of read. That being said, I’ve long ago learned to trust Backman’s process and just buckle up for the ride, and boy am I glad I did!

My Friends is a masterful examination of humanity—the ways friendships are made and last a lifetime, and the ripples we create along the way that inevitably change the course of those in our wake.

I laughed. I cried. I questioned everything I thought I knew about my own childhood friendships and where we’ve all ended up. Like many of Backman’s books recently, the beginning is a little slow and isn’t always obvious how it ties into the larger plot. Trust the process! Once things really get going, it’s hard not to get pulled in by the characters, their plight, and their history.

My Thoughts

This is the story of an artist (even though he dies in the first chapter).

I’d say this was also a story about all the lives he’s touched along the way, but that would be disingenuous. He was a world-famous artist, after all, and that’s a lot of lives. Most of whom didn’t really know him, let alone understand his art. No, the only ones that really matter here are the handful of best friends the artist grew up with . . . and the young girl he meets the day he dies and decides to leave the entirety of his fortune to, in the form of a painting of the sea. (And, if you look really closely, the painting of a pier. And, if you look even closer, the painting of three friends, frozen forever in a happy moment in childhood.)

One of the things I love most about Backman’s work is the way he fleshes out characters even after they’ve passed, which makes their death all that tragic. Oh, sure, it’s sad to open the book on the passing of what most would consider a young man of not-quite-40, dying an untimely death (regardless of the fact that he’s ready for it). But it’s forgivable, almost, because we don’t know this young man. People die all the time in our periphery, so what’s one more character?

Except this is the story of an artist, remember? So we learn about him, little by little, through the eyes of the people who loved him most (and one who only loved his art . . . though that was enough). This makes it all the more tragic, because it’s hard to fall in love with someone who is already dead and to be reminded of that fact, over and over again. But that’s grief for you.

This book is absolutely filled with broken people, trying to find where they fit in a world that constantly reminds them they don’t belong, and the people who keep making space for them anyway.

It almost feels like a love letter to the children who grew up in trauma, and the adults they eventually become. As someone with my own childhood trauma, and with good friends who carry different trauma, the way Backman doesn’t shy away from the uglier sides of life is refreshing. I’m not gonna lie, it can be hard to read, especially if you’re reading for escapism. Many people don’t want to be reminded of the uglier sides of life, especially those that can be visited upon children. But for the rest of us . . . there’s this beautiful testament of friendship and overcoming that serves as a reminder that every child matters, regardless of their background.

Our main character is Louisa, who has recently lost her best friend—her human, the only one that ever really mattered to her—and run away from her foster home, on the verge of her 18th birthday. She doesn’t have anywhere to run to, and no one to actually really miss her anyway. All she has is a postcard of a picture that means the world to her, and a half-baked plan to get to see that picture in person as it’s auctioned off.

What she doesn’t expect to find is the painting’s artist, let alone the fact that she would find herself the owner of this priceless work of art that means everything to her. The more she learns about the painting, though, the more she sees herself as a kindred spirit to the artist. It’s a story that was twenty-five years in the making . . . and it doesn’t have to end with Louisa. The future is up to her . . . but first, she has to understand how it all began.

As with much of Backman’s work, you have to go into My Friends trusting the process, because the story unfolds a little at a time, and the only thing you can be sure of is that the truth probably isn’t what you assume it is.

Obviously, we start with Louisa. Because all good stories start in the present. But the real story started twenty-five years ago with an artist and his group of friends, and a painting that is now priceless and, coincidentally, currently belongs to a homeless 18-year-old who has lost the only person she ever cared about.

Ted has lost someone, too. He was there twenty-five years ago when the painting was made, and he was there with the artist at the very end. And now, he’s stuck with Louisa . . . and still the artist, in a way, as he decides what to do with his friend’s ashes. The artist’s death was expected, since he’d been ill for a while. The complication of having to deal with Louisa was not. And Ted isn’t exactly a kid person. Or a teen person. Well . . . he’s not really a people person in general, and teens aren’t very good at being people yet to begin with.

I absolutely love older protagonists, because as I get older, I find that I relate to them more (for obvious reasons). Ted is only slightly older than I am. He has a lot of the same issues I have. He’s adorable, and he’s heartbroken, and he’s utterly unprepared to face a world without his person and with . . . whatever Louisa is, because he can’t seem to shake her, as much as he’d like to.

So he does the only thing he can: he tells her a story. The story of an artist, sure, but also a story of friendship, and of one painting in particular from a summer that changed them all in ways they couldn’t have predicted.

The story unfolds between two timelines—the now, with Ted and Louisa, and the then, before the artist had painted a single thing, during the summer that set everything into motion.

I admit that I sometimes have trouble keeping multiple timelines straight, but that wasn’t an issue here. The delineation between Ted and Louisa in the now and everything that happens to the teens then was clear and easy to follow. If you’ve ever read any of Backman’s previous work, you’ll recognize the style, where scenes sometimes feel repeated, except they’re not. They’re just expanded on. Sometimes a scene plays out one way, until it’s presented in another perspective, with more information, and the reader realizes that what they assumed wasn’t quite the truth.

This writing style is really interesting, because it builds on itself little by little, but never lost my interest. The plot twists feel natural and built in, and while they often caught me by surprise, they didn’t feel cheap or unearned. Even though there’s technically an unreliable narrator—in the sense that everyone keeps their secrets close to their chest, especially when they’re painful—I never felt like it was disingenuous. It felt like I was on the train with Ted and Louisa, hearing this story unfold little by little. Because most people tend to be crap at linear storytelling. But that’s what makes it so charming.

Make no mistake: this story is dark. You will absolutely laugh and be uplifted . . . but you have to work to earn those feelings. In between, you will absolutely RAGE and, just maybe, even relate.

This book honestly needs all the trigger warnings, because it has all the trauma. It also has a happy ending, if that helps at all. But the middle bit there? It’s going to be some rough going. You’re going to read a lot of heavy things and feel some very big emotions. If you can’t handle that (or aren’t interested in going through it), then this isn’t the book for you.

However, this is where I always love to fall back on Rudine Sims Bishop’s idea of books as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Readers who have gone through similar trauma deserve to see mirrors of themselves and, more than that, they deserve to see that they can have a happy ending. For everyone else, who had happy, healthy childhoods, it’s important to know that’s not always the experience. It can be eye-opening to know what others are raised into, and the strength and resilience they show in overcoming it. (And, just sometimes, the ways it keeps trying to drag them back.)

While I do feel this is a heartwarming and uplifting read, I want to be transparent when I say it isn’t an easy or a feel-good read. But I think it’s a super important one.

I want to leave you all with one last quote, absolutely selfishly, because it spoke to me, as both a bookwyrm and a librarian.

The thing I love most about Backman’s books are the ways I can easily see myself in at least one character. Even if we are vastly different, there are things I connect to at the core of his characters. My Friends is no exception to this.

I connected a lot to Ted, for various reasons. He’s the quiet sort that does his best to hold everyone and everything together, always sacrificing for others without asking or expecting the same in return (sometimes to his detriment). He has a quiet, nervous energy to him, but still does the hard things all the same, even when others can’t (or won’t). And when asked where he would want his ashes scattered, I felt that his answer also summed up my feelings beautifully:

About Fredrik Backman

Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, Anxious People, The Winners, My Friends, as well as two novellas and one work of nonfiction. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children.

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