Anxious People
Anxious People
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Fredrik Backman on Anxious People
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Burnout, an apartment hunt, and a friend long goneIn fall 2017, Backman was scheduled for a book fair in Copenhagen when his schedule collapsed around him. He hit what Swedes call ‘the wall,’ a phrase for burnout, and his wife and agent shut everything down. When he returned to writing, he was done with high-concept premises and wanted something closer to the exhaustion he had just lived through.
Not people in an extreme situation. Normal people living with anxiety and trying to cope, people who are feeling like, ‘I’m just trying to get through the day here.’
The location for the novel came from nine apartment viewings he and his wife crammed into a single day. What struck him was not the apartments but the people inside them, all strangers, all competing, all quietly unraveling in the same room.
I got the idea when I was apartment hunting with my wife. We went to see around nine apartments one day until I was like ‘they are all fine, let’s just pick one.’ But in that setting, there was also a strange sense of competition that brought out people’s anxieties and insecurities. I am interested in relationship dramas and why people act like idiots, so I found that fascinating.
The novel’s emotional center, a man on a bridge, reaches back roughly two decades before Backman ever sat down to write it. That loss in his early twenties permanently rewired how he moves through ordinary life.
I had a very close friend who ended his life when I was about 20 years old, and that never stops affecting you.
The consequence he describes is specific and sensory. In the Zibby Events interview he explained that after such a loss, you never hear a phone ringing at an odd hour without thinking the absolute worst, and that it never leaves, never ends. [paraphrased from audio] The novel’s plot, in which strangers must reckon with what a single person’s choice costs everyone around them, is built on exactly that installed dread.
How he wrote it
Smoke, mirrors, and a stolen psychiatristBackman has long described his character-building as a kind of licensed theft from the people around him, assembling figures from borrowed scraps until they feel real enough to care about. For this book, some of the source material was himself, specifically the version of himself sitting across from a therapist.
I steal little things from a lot of people, and I pour that into a character until that character is real for me. I care about this person, and at that point it works.
His first three novels were built around a single perspective, what he calls ‘comedies with one camera.’ Beartown and its sequel Us Against You then taught him to braid many viewpoints together. He had never attempted both techniques in the same book until this one.
This ‘Anxious People’ was the first time that I employed what I learned from ‘Beartown’ and ‘Us Against You’, the way of writing from a lot of different people’s perspective. But I employed that in a comedic setting. I hadn’t done that before. [paraphrased from audio]
That multi-viewpoint architecture was not purely a structural choice. Backman has been candid that the comedy and the emotional switching between characters serve the mystery plot in a very deliberate, almost mechanical way.
Part of that is also a trick. I need smoke and mirrors. I need something emotional going on over here or there’s something funny going on over here and I’m using that so that you don’t pay attention to where I’m placing the clues of the mystery. [paraphrased from audio]
The open house setting made this easier than almost any other location could have. Strangers crammed into an apartment are already asking themselves questions they rarely face in public: whether they can afford the life they imagine, whether they want children, where they expect to be in ten years. That ambient self-interrogation gave Backman a room already pressurized before the hostage situation ever begins.
The personal thread
What burnout and therapy actually cost himThe 2017 breakdown was not only the trigger for the book’s subject matter. It also changed the conditions under which Backman could write at all. He began working with a psychiatrist, and the friction of that relationship turned up directly in the novel’s pages.
The psychiatrist being annoyed with this narcissistic person comes from me.
The grief over his friend, and the particular alertness that grief installs, became one of the novel’s organizing emotional facts. He described it in the Zibby Events conversation not as a memory that fades but as a permanent change in how he receives ordinary moments.
After that, you never hear a phone ringing at an odd hour without thinking the absolute worst. That never leaves, that never ends. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
The last page, and what we owe each otherBackman begins every project from the same fixed point: the feeling he wants to leave in a reader’s body when the last page turns. For this book, that target emotion was about consequence, about the invisible weight of what one person’s choice places on everyone else who loved them.
Every novel I’ve ever written starts for me with the emotion that I would like you to have on the final page of the book.
He has been precise about what the man on the bridge is meant to demonstrate. The bridge is not a dramatic set piece; it is the book’s argument, stated in human terms.
A person standing on a bridge—that story affects a lot of other people. That’s the furthest edge of the anxiety I’ve struggled with. I wanted to write about that and how what you do and don’t do actually matters. People will have to deal with your choices for the rest of their life.
The comedy throughout the novel is not relief from the weight of that argument. Backman has described it as the only way he could make the argument at all, a structural requirement rather than a tonal choice.
I use comedy to be able to talk about the very serious matters because without the comedic settings, it would just be almost unbearable. [paraphrased from audio]
Once the book is finished and in a reader’s hands, Backman releases his claim on what it means. The posture is deliberate and consistent across his career: he writes toward a feeling, then lets the reader own it.
I just tell stories. As soon as the book is in your hands, it belongs to you. Your feelings about it, good or bad, are your own. And if you at least don’t feel like it was a total waste of time at the end… that’s good enough for me.