Fredrik Backman Foils the Critics (and Me)
December 9, 2025
The next book-club pick was My Friends, by Fredrik Backman. I requested it from the library—and found a queue a year long. What is it about this guy? A Man Called Ove was adorable, but anybody can make a grumpy old guy funny and endearing. Could the new book be that good? Should I splurge and buy it?
Backman keeps making the bestseller lists, yet the only Serious, Literary review that popped up for My Friends was inclusion in a summer-beach-read list. Alarming. I googled Backman himself and found him telling a reporter, just after My Friends came out, “Maybe this is the last thing I’ll ever publish. I’m not handling the pressure of it.” He felt caught in “the machine of the industry.” And though nearly every book he writes gets made into a movie, he seemed oblivious to the financial rewards. Intrigued enough to turn this into work, I asked the publisher (hopefully not complicit in all that pressure) for a review copy.
The novel’s main character is Louisa, an orphaned teenager who has broken free from foster care’s misery and abuse. She sneaks into an art auction to see a particular painting. A postcard bearing its image was the first thing she ever stole, in retaliation against a foster home that had stolen her peace. She has carried that postcard with her everywhere; it was “the first really beautiful thing she ever touched.” Seeing the painting in real life launches a series of events you should discover for yourself. But Backman’s caustic description of the auction scene is itself worth the entire book. You get the sense that he spun the plot on purpose to begin here, in a place where the guests are “taking photographs, not of the art, but of each other,” and we are reminded that “rich adults hardly ever notice anything, apart from mirrors.” Around these art lovers (or perhaps only art buyers?) circulate waiters in white shirts with trays of hors d’oeuvres, “because rich people love tiny food.”
Coming from a teenage girl, the class-conscious observations feel innocent and sharp. Is this Backman’s appeal, this repudiation of capitalist elitism? No; there are deeper issues at play. Louisa is grieving her friend Fish, refusing “to blame the fact that she took an overdose of pills” when the truth is that “Fish was murdered by reality…. She died of being sad all the time.”
Louisa has reason to feel the same, and she is, indeed, piteously sorry for herself, with the drama only a hurt teenager can summon. Yet at the same time, she is as resilient and deep-down joyful as Tigger. Liking her, I forge on. Now class and pain come together: “The kids on the pier,” four friends who are the subject of the painting, “weren’t supposed to be anything at all, they were supposed to be born poor and die poor, because that’s how the world is constructed.” True, but Backman is picking up some of Louisa’s dramatic excess, no? “They knew exactly how a key sounds in a lock when a father comes home dangerously drunk,” he tells us. And Louisa is “surprisingly good at being invisible. The secret to that is knowing that you don’t mean anything to anyone.”
Heartbreaking, but honestly? I want him to back off a bit. Let all that become obvious, instead of whacking us with it like a kid with a pool noodle. I read on. One of the kids in the painting is referred to only as “the artist,” his talent raising him above the grit of their everyday lives. Lives so hard that they give one another daily support, saying goodbye with a single word: “Tomorrow.”
Which hooks me right back into the book. That is the kind of restraint I was wanting, the compressed emotion far more powerful than the Dickensian bits. Beneath even the sentimental bits, there is cold clear truth. Of adolescence’s extremes, Backman writes: “perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.” An old woman announces that the secret to a long marriage is “Holding hand.” When Louisa repeats the phrase, bemused, the old woman explains, “Everyone say: Don’t go to bed angry! But you know, if you hold hand, very hard to be angry for long, you know? So you hold hand, when you go for walk, when you watch TV. You hold hand, so you know: You and me. Always.” Then she adds, “Other thing, important! In restaurant, he orders food I like, always. Halfway through meal, we swap plates. You understand? You must live with each other, not only alongside each other.”
All newlyweds should read those lines. Yet others leave me unsure whether to smile or cringe. The artist, his friend says, “gives everyone more love. But I think you’ve both given each other the same amount: everything you had.” Beautiful, or too much? When I read this—“Ted said he’d read that Superman’s cape was actually a blanket. It was the one his mom had wrapped him in when he was little and his parents had sent him away in the rocket to Earth”—I am furious that the image moves me. Kitsch, I spit. Too easy. Too manipulative. And with that, the literary snob I tuck away in a dark closet wakes up and stretches; there is work for her to do. The book is repetitive, she snarls, overwritten and oversimple, predictable and sentimental.
So why is it wonderful? Because Backman, who once operated a fork lift for ten or twelve hours a day, escaped literary snobbery. Could not even bear college. Started writing a blog, and from there entered fiction the way a fish slides into water. He is a decent, warmhearted, honest guy, and all those traits show up in his work. “I loved the book so much, I’m now buying a hard copy, which is rare for me,” one book-club member, a photographer, tells me, adding that My Friends is now one of her top ten favorite books ever. Another friend, a physician, nods—My Friends is on her top ten list too. The language is “precise, witty, tender, and relatable,” she says, “and with that same precision, he also describes that which should not be relatable: violence, abuse, and cowardice.”
Which is exactly what I would think if I had not been indoctrinated by critics.
Real readers are not hamstrung by critics’ inhibitions—or rather, the ways they want to inhibit writers. So what if the pacing is slow? What if “overwrought” is really “heartfelt”? I hope Backman keeps making the sacrifice, opening his big, chatty, sentimental heart to the rest of us. This is a man who, asked the cliché about what books are on his night stand, says, “I have two kids and a German shepherd, so we don’t have a night stand, we barely have furniture.” Asked his ideal reading experience, he says, “I love to read in a room where my wife is also reading.” He loves well, and has been loved: “My mother is still the person I talk about reading with the most.”
Backman writes about empathy, about unlikely friendships and how they save us, about small acts of kindness and ordinary lives. He understands “the impossible human experience of just trying to get through the day with everyone you love being somewhat OK at the end of it.” And he has eased me away from the critic’s dark closet.
In My Friends, an artist working as a janitor quotes his mom: “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.”
