My Friends
My Friends
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Fredrik Backman on My Friends
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A bookshop, a dedication, and a question about the last bookFor roughly two years before ‘My Friends’ took shape, Backman was in genuine crisis about his career. The draft he submitted ran to 82 parallel storylines and thousands of characters, and everyone who read it responded with the kind of careful, confused politeness that told him everything he needed to know.
I’ve just been dealing with it very poorly. And I felt maybe this is not for me, and maybe I should go and see if there’s something else that I could do that would make me a happier and a little more balanced individual.
His wife’s response to the broken draft named something he hadn’t let himself say aloud. She wasn’t asking him to fix the book. She was asking him to save himself first.
My wife finally sat me down and said: ‘It’s really dark, Fredrik. Because you’re in a dark place right now. It’s okay. But you need to find some hope in this story, some redemption, not for the book but for you.’
The direction that replaced the sprawling draft arrived not at a desk but on a freezing Saturday at The English Bookshop in Stockholm, where Backman had taken his twelve-year-old daughter. He watched teenagers packed into the aisles, asking staff for Dostoevsky. A single question formed, and answering it became the book’s spine.
I thought: If this is the last book I ever write, who would I want it to be for? And then I wrote the dedication page: ‘To anyone who is young and wants to create something. Do it.’ The entire story came out of that.
He wrote the dedication before he rewrote a single scene. The rest of the novel followed the address he had already made.
How he wrote it
Two timelines, one teenager, and a lesson from his daughterOnce he stripped the draft back to the teenagers-on-the-pier material that two independent early readers had separately flagged as the book’s emotional center, the structural problem became technical. The novel runs two timelines twenty-five years apart, and each required a genuinely different register.
Technically, the biggest challenge was tempo and movement and language. How do I move this story forward? For how long can I keep your attention? What is every character’s distinct voice?
The older group of characters, drawn from people he grew up with, came to him without much resistance. Louisa, the eighteen-year-old in the present timeline, was a different problem entirely. Writing contemporary teenagers badly produces something instantly recognizable as false, and he knew it.
I just felt like I’m gonna retire from writing because whatever I had, I don’t have anymore. Like I can’t, the thing that I have in my head, I can’t get it onto paper. I can’t make them feel the things that I want them to feel. [paraphrased from audio]
Louisa’s voice arrived through a domestic exchange that had nothing to do with the novel. Backman had asked his daughter whether his jeans were skinny jeans, received a look his wife described as ‘why is it speaking,’ and then heard his daughter deliver a line he immediately recognized as the character he had been searching for. [paraphrased from audio]
That’s the voice! That’s the voice! I got the voice! [paraphrased from audio]
The emotional literacy Backman needed for the art world running through the novel came from a different domestic source. His wife studied art history, and their trips to museums together gave him the sensory detail the story required.
One specific scene in the novel, where a nurse tells a dying artist that she loved watching her husband’s face while he stood in front of the artist’s paintings, came directly from how Backman feels in museums with his wife. He did not arrive at it through research into the art world but through years of watching someone he loves be moved by things.
In the book, I wrote this line where a nurse turns to a world-famous artist and says: ‘My husband loved your work. We saw some of your paintings in a gallery once. I loved the way he looked when he looked at them.’ That’s from the way I feel about going to museums with my wife. I love how much she loves things.
The personal thread
Success that landed on the wrong personThe unnamed artist at the center of ‘My Friends’ is famous, globally successful, and exhausted by it. Backman built that character from a feeling he has carried through his entire public career: that the kind of success he received belongs to someone else, someone who actually wants it.
It absolutely comes from me feeling that someone else should have had this — someone who loves being onstage and someone who loves traveling and someone who wants to be famous should have had this success. This success is wasted on me.
The publishing industry’s demands compound that discomfort. Backman’s anxiety and his sensitivity to others are, by his own account, the same qualities that make his fiction work. The machine built around bestselling authors asks those qualities to go dormant on schedule, which he treats as structurally absurd.
You’re not supposed to be a balanced, high-functioning individual because that’s not what makes you a great writer. People expect you to be able to shut that off and say, ‘Yeah, but now we need you to think about marketing, meeting about marketing, thinking about your brand.’
What he wants us to sit with
The feeling at the bottom of every pageThe dedication, ‘to anyone who is young and wants to create something, do it,’ is not decorative. When the ABA asked what he hoped readers would take from the book, he narrowed it to that single instruction and the Beckett phrase, ‘fail better,’ which he treats as the complete alternative to chasing fame or approval.
I hope you just take that. If you do, that’s enough. Whatever it is you want to create that you for whatever reason are afraid of pursuing, because you think you’re not good enough or not smart enough or whatever it is. You just have to go, try, fail, try again. ‘Fail better,’ like Samuel Beckett put it. Not for success or fame or fortune or any of that bullshit. Just for you.
The emotional register he is actually aiming for across all his books is harder to name than hope or redemption. In explaining it to USA Today, he reached for a specific scene that does not appear in any of his novels but that he believes runs underneath all of them.
At the end of the night (when) you’re just exhausted and someone in your life who loves you and cares about you just turns around and looks at you and says, ‘You did good. You did good. I can see that you struggled, and I can see that you did your best.’ That’s what I’m looking for in my books, and maybe that’s interpreted by some people as hope, and maybe it’s redemption and maybe it’s something else. But I’m looking for that. I’m looking for you to close the book at the final page and feel like it’s OK.