My Friends
57 pages • 1-hour read
Fredrik BackmanMy Friends
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Symbols & Motifs
The Painting
The novel’s central image is a painting titled The One of the Sea. From a distance, the painting appears to be an abstract depiction of sky and sea. Only by moving in and looking closely can a viewer see three figures on the pier. Contrary to its title, however, the painting isn’t about the sea at all, but about the depth of friendship and the ways art can capture feelings that transcend words. Louisa comments that she’s “never even seen it. But she’s memorized every inch of blue on that painting. It’s her happiest place” (16). Louisa intuitively sees that grief and love are embedded beneath the surface. Within the brushstrokes lie secrets that are revealed over the course of the novel, such as the chili sauce, the flowers symbolizing Joar’s mom, and the story behind how Kimkim paid for the paint. The figures are nearly invisible, reflecting how much of their connection was unspoken or misunderstood by others. The painting becomes a visual metaphor for memory, for the subtle ways people shape each other’s lives even when they’re no longer physically present.
The painting symbolizes the intersection of creativity and friendship, highlighting how both can serve as lifelines during difficult moments and how artistic creation can emerge from pain and displacement, highlighting the theme of Art and Human Connection. Seeking refuge from their home lives, the teens spend long summer days on an abandoned pier, and from that, a famous work of art is born. The painting captures Kimkim’s emotional longing for a world where he and his friends could be fully seen and accepted. The sea, often associated with both danger and freedom, reflects the contradictions of Kimkim’s own life—his strong friendships and tumultuous, fragile interiority. Like the painting itself, the story of its creation must be approached closely and with patience to reveal its hidden meaning. Thus, Louisa must allow herself to trust Ted and get closer to him to understand the painting she holds so dear.
The painting’s backstory reveals that grief, love, and friendship operate much like brushstrokes on canvas—individually, they may seem insignificant, but together, they create something larger than the sum of their parts. The teenagers’ summer on the pier becomes both the raw material and emotion that allows for artistic transformation, asserting that even when a person feels invisible or misunderstood, and life feels overwhelming, there remains the possibility that someone will see clearly enough to capture not just an image, but the essence. Louisa says, “When I was standing in front of that painting, I forgot to be alone, I forgot to be afraid” (434). The painting endures as proof that some connections transcend physical presence and that art can preserve what time threatens to erode. Finding meaning in life requires a closer look, to move beyond the surface, to discover the figures waiting patiently on the pier.
The Pier
Physically, the pier offers refuge, a hidden, quiet, and out-of-sight space where Ted, Joar, Ali, and Kimkim can escape the pressures of school, family, and society: “The pier was their secret place, forgotten by the world, no one else knew it existed” (80), allowing them to be fully themselves without fear. Their worlds are full of violence and trauma, and the pier represents the safety they’ve all been denied in their childhoods. It is a space untouched by adult cruelty or misunderstanding, a sacred space, carved out from a world that often fails to understand or protect them. The pier symbolizes the places and spaces where people feel safe enough to be themselves and be known, connecting to the theme of The Value of Friendship.
Located on the edge of town, the dock symbolizes the threshold between confinement and freedom, the known and the unknown. When teenagers leap into the sea from the pier, it is both a thrill and a physical expression of their desire to escape and experience something beyond what the world has given them. The vastness of the sea contrasts with the narrowness of their circumstances. For Kimkim, Joar, Ted, Ali, and later Louisa, the water symbolizes both danger and liberation. It reminds them that something greater than themselves and their pain exists. Symbolically, the dock functions as both an ending and a beginning, where friendships are sealed, secrets are shared, and futures are imagined. Later, in memory and through the painting, it serves as a portal to the past, providing comfort to Kimkim, Ted, and Louisa.
Most of the past timeline unfolds on the pier, capturing a moment in time, the summer before the friends turn 15 and are separated. The scenes from the dock are frozen in Ted’s memory and immortalized in Kimkim’s famous painting. Its repeated presence in the novel highlights how formative friendship was for each of them and how its influence continues to echo through their adult lives. Even long after they’ve physically left the pier, it remains a part of them and becomes a touchstone for who they were before trauma divided them, a fixed point in time that helps them understand what they’ve lost and what still connects them. Time spent together at the pier forms the friends’ happiest memories, and for Kimkim, it’s the place he goes in his mind in his final moments on earth: “[T]he artist stands and thinks about a pier under a cloudless sky. About being fourteen and floating on your back in the sea and starting to laugh so hard that you roll over and almost drown” (42). Just as a dock functions as a safe place to dock a boat, the pier becomes an emotional anchor and a symbol of a time before everything fractured, when the world still held wonder and tenderness for the group of friends.
Time, Clocks, and Timepieces
Time in the novel is not experienced as a linear progression from past to present, but as a looping, overlapping current where the weight of the past constantly pulls at the present. Events from 25 years ago echo in the characters’ current actions, and moments of childhood return with vivid clarity. This structure mirrors the fragmented and involuntary nature of memory, which often returns at inopportune or highly emotional moments. The recursive storytelling illustrates how unprocessed pain remains in the body and mind, particularly when left unspoken, and contributes to the theme of The Relationship Between Grief and Healing. This recapitulatory form also enhances the novel’s exploration of connection across generations. Ted’s story brings Louisa, who has never met Kimkim, into his emotional world through fragmented memories. Her path toward healing does not unfold chronologically but involves entering someone else’s remembered world. In this way, memory becomes a shared act as time folds on itself and extends into eternity through storytelling, which can stop or accelerate time.
The motif of clocks and timepieces appears throughout the novel to reflect both urgency, regret, and nostalgia. Kimkim declares his life has been “long,” though he dies before middle age. Joar feels like there’s a countdown ticking inside him to his death, fueling his need to protect his friends. Ted is suspended in emotional stasis after Kimkim’s death, staring at the watch bearing the initials of those he loves: “[H]e still wishes the same thing, that he was fourteen years old and that the world was full of broken clocks” (169). When he returns to the story, he marks time by every experience that was their “last.” For Louisa, “[t]ime is a strange concept” as she moves through life without a reliable timeline (12), disoriented by constantly being on the run. Each character struggles with how quickly time can fracture a life and how slowly it can take to piece one back together.
The novel’s exploration of time is a reckoning with the cruel beauty of impermanence as time itself is personified as a thief and a wound: “You dream of nothing but being able to forgive time for making us old. For not letting us stay on a pier with our best friends. For letting summers end” (69). The story conveys the desire to freeze time at its most tender, to remain in the golden hours of youth where love and friendship feel unbreakable and unending. The memorable summer captured in the painting didn’t just end; it was taken, and with it, youthful versions of the friends that can never return. The story captures the ache of growing older, while honoring how memory, love, and art attempt to hold onto what time insists on taking.
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