My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Fredrik Backman on My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
Two stories that had no business mergingThe book Backman intended to write second was not this one. He had already mapped out a quieter, more contained story, one centered on Britt-Marie, the neighbor who makes a brief appearance in ‘A Man Called Ove’. That plan dissolved when a second idea arrived and refused to stay separate.
I had plans to tell her story in my second book, actually. It was supposed to tell the story of her life in that house and how she fights this quiet war with her neighbors all day long. But, as usual, I couldn’t stick to the plan and I had this other story idea about this seven-year-old girl with an imaginary world and a crazy grandmother and they kind of merged with the first one and well... things got out of hand. When my publisher read it, their first response was, ‘This is too weird, no one will understand it!’ To which my wife responded: ‘Well this is what happens if you leave Fredrik unsupervised in his office for six months; blame yourselves!’
His publisher’s alarm was immediate. His wife’s verdict was funnier and more accurate.
While Backman wrote the book, ‘A Man Called Ove’ was quietly selling in numbers that would eventually make it an international phenomenon. He had no idea. Neither did his publisher. That insulation from commercial noise turned out to be the condition under which this stranger, weirder novel got finished.
No, because I had no idea it would be a success. Neither did my publisher. When they figured out that A Man Called Ove had started selling a lot of copies I had been writing my next novel in peace and quiet for 6 months.
Once ‘Ove’ sales became undeniable, the commercial logic was obvious to everyone except the person writing the next book. Backman received a sustained campaign from his sales team, which he met with a response that was less argument than bafflement.
The sales department sent me a lot of emails asking me in different ways if I couldn’t write an Ove 2 instead, but I kept answering ‘HOW!!!???’
He did not write ‘Ove 2’. He wrote a novel about a seven-year-old girl, a dead grandmother, a fairy-tale kingdom, and a creature of undefined species.
How he wrote it
Fifty rewrites and one undefined creatureA fellow writer had warned Backman to begin his second book before the first one attracted reviews, so he would be neither inflated by praise nor deflated by criticism when he sat down to work. He followed the advice. What he could not insulate himself from was the difficulty of the book itself, which demanded more revision than anything he had written before or since.
I rewrote My Grandmother maybe 50 times, but I rewrote Britt-Marie maybe five.
Backman attributes the gap between fifty rewrites and five not to ambition but to a specific technical deficit he describes without self-pity. He thinks of the problem in terms of musicians: the skill that makes a great songwriter is separate from the skill that makes a great instrumentalist, and he knows which one he is.
The thing is: I’m not a very good writer. And I don’t say that to be humble, I’m just saying that I’m not very good technically. I’m better at telling stories than constructing language, which I think can be compared to musicians: the best song writers are rarely the best musicians.
The book’s most unusual character is the wurse, a creature that functions as both threat and guardian inside the fairy-tale kingdom Elsa’s grandmother has built for her. Backman withheld any physical description of the wurse on purpose, wanting each reader to supply their own image. The plan worked, in the sense that readers did imagine the creature. The plan backfired, in the sense that many of them imagined a dog.
I really wanted to write it the way so that every reader can cast it themselves. I wanted to force people to use their imagination. Which of course backfired, because now I’ve, true story, have had more than thirty different email discussions with people from at least six different counties who’s written me to tell me ‘DOGS CAN’T EAT CHOCOLATE THEY WILL DIE!!!’.
When asked directly what approach he brought to the second book, given the pressure to repeat ‘Ove’’s success, Backman’s answer strips away any sense of strategy. The honest account of his method is also the most disarming thing he says about the book’s origins.
I didn’t have a different approach with the second book, I just wrote something I liked and tried to get my wife to laugh and hoped that someone else would like it too.
The personal thread
Characters who outlive their booksBackman has said that his fear of death surfaces in his fiction whether he plans it or not. He does not offer a tidy explanation for why that particular fear keeps arriving, only an observation about where it keeps leading him.
Well, fear of dying is crucial in all of my writing, it seems, and I really don’t know why. I just end up at that question over and over: How do you live a life?
The characters Backman commits to fully do not feel finished to him once a manuscript is done. His description of what happens after a book is published upends the usual author-character hierarchy: in his account, the character carries on and the author becomes the one left behind.
My experience is that whenever I write a book like that, giving it absolutely all I’ve got, then the characters become real people to me. I consider them actual human beings, so I begin to view and react to my old books more as documentaries. As if I did an interview with an actual person, wrote a book about it, and afterwards that person continued their life and went on to other things and had an existence without me.
What he wants us to sit with
The feeling at the final pageBackman treats fairy tales not as a genre below adult attention but as a form that adults abandon at their own cost. The novel is built on that conviction: Elsa’s grandmother uses fairy tales as the only language adequate to the truths she needs to pass on. Backman’s position on the form, stated without qualification, is this.
I think any adult who doesn’t hold a special place for fairy-tales needs to get help.
off-the-shelfbooks.blogspot.com, “Off-the-Shelf Books: AUTHOR IN THE SPOTLIGHT - Fredrik Backman”When asked what readers should expect from the book, Backman gave an answer that is either false modesty or a deliberate refusal to sell. Either way, it is the least useful blurb in the history of author interviews, and it is also characteristically him.
They shouldn’t. It’s not very good.
off-the-shelfbooks.blogspot.com, “Off-the-Shelf Books: AUTHOR IN THE SPOTLIGHT - Fredrik Backman”In a 2025 interview about ‘My Friends’, his most recent novel, Backman was asked what he hopes readers carry away from his work. He answered in terms he explicitly applied to all his books. The image he reaches for is not transcendence or catharsis but something smaller and more specific: the particular relief of being seen by someone who witnessed the effort.
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.