My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. —Anton Ego

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

Because sometimes Louisa is a genius, but sometimes she isn’t a genius, and the problem is that the genius and the non-genius share a brain.

They’re the sort of guards who have so much muscle that they have muscles that don’t even have Latin names, because back when people spoke Latin, idiots as big as this didn’t even exist yet.

because the building where the auction is being held is an old church. We know that because all the rich people at the auction keep saying to each other: “Did you know this is an old church?” Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.

Obviously none of them dares to actually talk about the paintings on the walls, they’re far too frightened of accidentally thinking the wrong thing, someone else needs to think something first so they can know what they’re allowed to love.

She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.

There is a sort of happiness so overwhelming that it is almost unbearable, your soul seems to kick its way through your bones.

The woman pretty much has the emotional range of a lampshade.

It turns out, to his horror, that Louisa isn’t at all afraid of index fingers, because she isn’t an elevator button,

Art is empathy.

She cried when she realized that she was a person without memories, but Fish sat beside her and said: “To Hell with that, why should your stupid brain get to decide what happened and what didn’t? You can still keep that memory, it’s yours!”

Imagination is a child’s only weapon.

Unfortunately, of course, the guard does not give the impression that he is the sort of person who appreciates symbolism of that sort, he just rushes over, as angry as a wild boar that’s been given a habanero suppository,

Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.

Because in an ugly place, he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion. In a world full of sledgehammers, his art was a declaration of war.

He would often try to think that 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.

The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die. So how great must our imaginations be for us to even summon up the enthusiasm to get out of bed each morning? Endless! Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second.

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

“I’m not your reason, no one is your reason, your art is your own,” the artist protests gently.

“Run, Louisa! I hope you learn to swim. I hope you paint every single wall from here to the sea. Now, run!”

The artist will never give the can of spray paint back, she will never get the chance to tell him what he really meant to her. It doesn’t matter, he’s with her everywhere now, on every wall.

He thinks about paintings he left all his breath in, which were then sold for so much money that old men and women no longer even hang them on their walls, they keep them in bank vaults.

He’s dreamed of being able to say: “Being human is to grieve, constantly.” Because what he really wants to know is: “How the hell do all the rest of you cope?”

Ted will stand up and discover that he’s forgotten how to walk too, that happens to us all when the love of our life falls asleep for the last time, because when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together.

Once upon a time, church bells used to ring for the dead, now it’s telephones, and the more they ring, the more important the person was.

That’s the very hardest thing to understand about death: nothing. That the world shrinks without him, because instead of him there is just emptiness.

It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it the artist manages to make someone he loves laugh out loud, so that every single wall sings. It would take less to make you believe in God.

A soft little exhalation through the stubble of his beard, one final little beat of his heart, and then the world is smaller.

Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

His death belongs to the whole world now. Louisa will never quite be able to forgive the world for that.

Ted, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything, which makes Louisa very jealous. His brain seems a lot more disciplined than the anarchic mush she’s got inside her own skull.

“If you were his friend, I’m sorry. Because the whole world lost an artist, but you lost your human. And I’m sorry you had to share that with the rest of us. You should be allowed to have your grief in peace.”

“He wanted you to have it because he… because he spent his whole life waiting to meet someone who saw a wall the same way he did.”

Nothing weighs more than someone else’s belief in you.

Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it. If he was told to draw, it was like waking from a dream and trying to dream it again.

When they all laughed, they belonged together.

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.

“Meet” is probably the wrong word, no one met Joar, because you don’t “meet” a natural disaster, you get hit by it.

Then Ted smiled. That’s how long it takes to become best friends. A whole lifetime, a single second.

When you’re fourteen years old, friendship and infatuation are the same feeling, light from the same star, so perhaps there ought to be a better word for it.

Art is context.

Joar wasn’t stupid, he just happened to be the sort of person who only thought about one thing at a time, which was why he was so good at fixing engines. The artist, on the other hand, thought about everything all at once,

In their world it isn’t the artist who should be admired, it’s the owner, because only something which has a price can have any value.

He didn’t know a damn thing about art, his hands just drew for the same reason that some feet dance: they don’t know how to stop.

“You’re not worth a better life than us. It’s just that you’ll never be able to cope with living like us. A normal life? You’re too soft for that. Staying here and working in the fucking harbor like our dads? Getting up every morning and feeling like shit? Being angry all the fucking time? Day after day for fifty years? That’s hard. You have to be a hard man. You aren’t. You need a different life.”

The teachers said that Joar didn’t listen, but what they really meant was that he didn’t obey.

so they hit him and shoved him headfirst into a locker, but that didn’t seem to hurt him enough either. Not until they tore up his sketch pad, the artist had never experienced pain like that, so he screamed.

he still only knew the same simple things: Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.