40 pages • 1-hour read
And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer And Longer
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Background
Authorial Context: Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman is a contemporary Swedish author known for his emotionally grounded narratives that center ordinary people facing extraordinary emotional circumstances. Across his body of work, Backman consistently explores themes of vulnerability, aging, grief, and the forms of care that sustain communities. His style combines accessible prose and understated humor, often foregrounding relationships over plot-driven action. This approach strongly informs And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, which reflects many of the concerns present throughout his broader career.
Backman first gained international recognition with A Man Called Ove (2012), a novel that similarly examines aging, grief, and human connection. In later works such as My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry (2013) and Britt-Marie Was Here (2014), Backman continues to focus on intergenerational relationships, unconventional family structures, and characters who struggle to articulate their emotional needs. These elements are present in And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, which avoids subplots and external conflict to concentrate on the interior experience of memory loss and familial love.
In the Letter to the Reader, Backman speaks openly about writing the novella as a way to process his own experiences with aging relatives and to find language to explain cognitive decline to his children. Rather than depicting dementia through clinical detail, Backman translates the experience into metaphor and shared imagination, allowing readers to engage with the emotional reality of decline without requiring specialized knowledge.
Literary Context: Vignettes in Contemporary Fiction
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer is structured as a series of vignettes rather than following a continuous, linear narrative. Vignettes are brief, self-contained scenes that emphasize mood, character, or idea over plot progression. This literary form presents moments of experience without requiring explicit transitions or causal explanations, making it particularly effective for representing fragmented consciousness and emotional memory. In Backman’s novella, the vignette structure closely mirrors the lived experience of cognitive decline, giving the text a surrealist style and reinforcing the its thematic concerns.
Vignettes are a popular technique for conveying intensely personal emotional experiences. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cicneros’s 2013 novella about a Latina girl’s coming of age in Chicago; A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s 2010 collection of interconnected stories centering on music; and As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner’s 1930 classic novel told in 59 short vignettes from the perspectives of 15 different characters all use the vignette to convey powerful stories in a condensed, poetic form.
In And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, the vignette form allows Backman to juxtapose contrasting emotion states that switch rapidly, without warning. Moments of grief and confusion are frequently interrupted by humor, tenderness, or sensory detail, such as the smell of hyacinths or the absurdity of “unnecessary presents.” These shifts might feel abrupt in a conventional narrative structure but are natural within vignette-based storytelling, which accommodates emotional fluctuation without narrative justification. Through fragmentation, repetition, and compressed scenes, the form becomes a reflection of cognitive decline, making the reader’s experience inseparable from the story being told.
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