A Q&A with Fredrik Backman, Author of May Indie Next List Top Pick “My Friends”

Bookselling This Week: Would you tell us a little about developing this novel? Where did the inspiration for this story come from?

Fredrik Backman: I wish I had a better answer for this question, but I very rarely know how anything works or comes from. Every book is just a long, chaotic process of me sitting alone in a room, arguing loudly with people I have made up.

In this case, it started with me writing a first draft that had about 82 parallel storylines and somewhere around 9,000 characters. Everyone I showed it to said, “Oh…this is…interesting,” in that tone of voice you would have after trying the cooking of someone who is clearly drunk.

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 just for the book but for you.”

I didn’t know it was that obvious, but I had been struggling really badly with my confidence as a writer, and for about two years I really considered retiring from book publishing altogether. Then I showed the draft to two other writers, and one of them said, “I really loved the story about the kids on the pier. I got angry every time you left them to go talk about someone else.” And the other one said, “The story about the kids on that pier made me really think about how to be a better father.”

So, I took all that, and I started from the beginning with the kids on the pier. 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.

BTW: I love the dedication. That desire to create something is such a big part of this book. Do you want to tell us a little more about that? What else do you hope readers take away from this story?

FB: 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.  

BTW: My Friends is full of both beautiful moments and heartbreaking ones. It also moves between timelines, following both Louisa and the subjects of her favorite painting some decades earlier. What was the most challenging part of creating this story?

FB: There’s always a technical part and an emotional part to a novel. 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? Emotionally, the biggest challenge by far was the fact that so much of the people in this book comes from people I grew up with — some of whom I’ve lost along the way. I had a lot of days talking to ghosts. 

BTW: My Friends is in part about how deeply you can be affected by a piece of art, like Louisa and The One of the Sea. Has a piece of art had a similar effect on you? Which one?

FB: The thing is, I didn’t know a lot about art growing up. But my wife loves art. She studied art history, so wherever we travel with our kids, she’ll take us to some awesome museum. Some of my fondest travel memories with the family are from places like the Picasso Museum in Málaga, or the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. We saw a VR exhibition of the works of Van Gogh in Copenhagen last summer, and my kids talked about The Starry Night for an entire dinner afterwards. That’s everything to me.

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.

BTW: Would you tell us a bit about the role of books and indie bookstores in your life?

FB: When writing My Friends — when I was really stuck and struggling with my confidence — I went with my 12-year-old daughter to The English Bookshop in Stockholm. It was a Saturday, it was freezing cold outside, and the place was absolutely PACKED with teenagers.

They were all insanely passionate about books I’d never heard about. My daughter went on and on about book genres I didn’t even know existed. Then all of a sudden, one young woman asked a staff member, “Do you have White Nights by Dostoevsky?”

I remember standing there in this small indie bookshop just thinking, “Whoever is saying young people don’t read anymore is out of their goddamn minds.”

Whenever I feel lost in the industry part of the book industry, I think about that Saturday. The young people are taking everything over now, and it’s going to be great.