Fredrik Backman’s novel, My Friends, broke my heart and opened my eyes. What a poignant story! Backman’s story explores loyalty—both loving, encouraging loyalty, and fear-fueled, evil-hiding loyalty. The story behind a famous painting exposes a vast sea of natural human responses to life’s challenges. Backman sprinkles nuggets of wisdom throughout. The ones about encouragement and art resonated most with me.
After a most delightfully creative chance meeting, timid, professorial, middle-aged Ted and street-smart, unfiltered, teenage Louisa embark on a train ride during which they get to know each other. Provoke and protect each other, too. The unlikely pair have some close calls as they transport Ted’s best friend’s very valuable painting cross-country. Ted wants Louisa to know about the three tiny figures sitting on an ocean pier in his friend’s painting, and about the artist, since she has a gift for artistic expression herself.
Backman’s clear delineation of characters in their dialogue and actions is brilliant. Ted reminisces about the artist’s and his families and friends back when they were young teens, but my favorite relationship was Ted’s and Louisa’s. Her blunt, often funny, observations surprise Ted at every turn. Both learn and grow during this train trip.
Their growing connection and the longstanding childhood friendships are heartening to read. These kids really had each other’s backs. Painful to read, however, is the riptide of violence flowing through these teens’ lives. How much physical bullying they endured, the blood and cruelty, shocked me. And bloody beatings by fathers.
Yet—against this backdrop of violence, the friends emerged hopeful and able to create and to love within humanity’s realities. If friends’ challenges to support the artist’s painting his masterpiece showcase the loyalty of friendship, bullying and beatings showcase cowardice as a type of loyalty. When Joar’s (one boy) mom was brutally beaten for the umpteenth time and the dad’s coworkers gathered outside their house, Ted remembers “the longest, most unbearable silence he has ever experienced. … Those men from the harbor would have to bear an eternal shame, all friends of men like Joar’s old man have to do that.” [page 373] Page 374 is the best explanation I’ve read about how all kinds of abuse get covered up. We all have that cowardly loyalty in us.
My Friends is an engaging and powerful novel. Most anyone would be richer for reading it.
Here are some of my favorite nuggets:
“Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.” [pages 79 and 80]
“You know what Mom always says? You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.” [page 194]
“Great art is a small break from human despair …” [page 195]
“The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.” [page 361]
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