My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

The problem was that once Joar’s brain got stuck on a thought, all his brain cells flocked around it like ants around a sugar sandwich, but unfortunately it wasn’t always the smartest brain cells that got there first.

He refused to eat cilantro because some people love cilantro and some think it tastes of soap. It didn’t taste like soap to Joar, he just refused to eat something that was so damn unfair.

He only fought for those he loved. So the artist lived in constant fear that one day Joar would love someone so much that he would end up in prison.

When Joar got home that evening, his old man almost beat him to death, and if it hadn’t been so unbearably cruel, it would have been almost ironic, beating a child because he had been fighting at school. His old man came down on him like an avalanche, and it wasn’t even to teach him a lesson. He just did it because when the principal called him, he had had to sit there and pretend to be a proper parent, a real dad. It had reminded that bastard of what he really was: nothing. That was why he beat the boy extra hard.

The artist was fourteen years old and knew nothing about art, but one day he would be grown-up and celebrated around the world, and would realize that 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.

There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” which ends with the lines: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Ted remembers how he cried sitting in the pew afterward, inconsolably and violently, until his throat stung and his chest ached. Until then he hadn’t known that grief is physical, an abuse of the living.

“I’m not worried you’re going to die. I’m worried about you being dead. I’m worried about being alive without you.”

“Stop it,” Ted had muttered. “Stooop it,” the artist had teased affectionately. “Can you try to behave like an adult, just for once?” “Definitely not! Under no circumstances are we allowed to be adults, Ted, that’s fatal! All adults die, sooner or later, haven’t you noticed?”

at the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back.

doctors knew how bad it really was. “Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,” the artist had said, and there had been no fear in his voice, no bitterness. It had been a long life. Wild and precious.

Everyone he met told him they loved him, hardly anyone survives that.

The artist was an observer, he couldn’t bear to be observed, the world always gets those mixed up.

he looked for love in all the wrong places and got his heart crushed in every possible way.

My art is only an investment now, everyone who owns a piece of me hopes I’ll die, because nothing is more valuable at auction than an unfulfilled life.”

“You know what they say about bumblebees? That they shouldn’t be able to fly? Well, neither should people!”

At first they both pretended that it was for Ted’s sake, that he had needed a vacation. But really it was the artist who needed a home, and home was Ted’s snoring in the darkness, like when they were kids, back in the basement.

But if you don’t believe that boys’ souls can be connected across a great distance, you know nothing about them.

“There is no death, only a lot of dead.”

Now Ted is sitting on a train, with a box of ashes and a famous painting and a teenager clearly out of her mind. It really is a remarkably bad idea, all this. Worse than socks in the toaster.

Once she’s gone, Ted sits alone and marvels at how silently an eighteen-year-old can get to her feet, without so much as a single groan or creak of the spine. When you grow up and see how naturally a teenager moves, you realize the logic of Stone Age people dying when they were twenty-seven, because from then on, the body does everything it can do to die. You

“You’re starting to get old,” the artist had grinned, and Ted had felt so insulted that he blurted out: “Says someone who’s actually dying!”

“Why do you keep looking at your watch?” she asks. “To check if the train is on time,” he replies, more irritably than she thinks is strictly reasonable. “Are you in a hurry?” “No.” “So why do you care if it’s on time, then?”

When you get old, gravity pulls the corners of your mouth down, the road to a smile grows longer.

It’s strange, the things you remember from your childhood, but perhaps what you forget is even stranger. When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there’s never any wind or rain in nostalgia.

She never saw the knife, she didn’t need to, because being a mother is special too: you can feel in your skin when there’s something wrong.

Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.

Everyone should be allowed to be fourteen for far longer than a year. There are so many other ages we could skip instead: thirty-nine, for instance, is an age that Ted would happily have done without.

The brain is so peculiar, the things that get stuck in it.

But you know who else probably didn’t like Easter? Jesus.”

“People worshipped his art. He was loved by millions of people. But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”

“When she was in a good mood, she used to sing in French, which was both wonderful and unbearable, because she was great at French but terrible at singing.

Ali really was Joar’s second life. They only had each other for a little more than a year. Who has time to get to know someone, really know them, in that time? If you so much as ask the question, you weren’t there, you’ve never fallen that madly in love, never been addicted to another person’s breath.

It wouldn’t have made any difference if Joar and Ali’s love had lasted eighty years, it was already everything right from the start, bright light and loud bangs and heart attacks.

That’s how suddenly it happened, falling in love.

The children of addicts always know what the time is.

Attention was lethal, that was how you ended up being bullied and beaten.

Who gets a friend like that? Hardly anyone.

She had strong opinions about television programs and she loved cheese.

She had been riding her bike and gotten hit by a car, she had left home one day and never come back, she was alive and the next second she was dead.

After all, Ted is the kind of man who can hardly bear waiters asking him how the food is, because he thinks it’s slightly too intimate a question.

“Doesn’t your generation understand irony?” he says. “Does YOUR generation understand irony?”

He seems to have reached the age where he needs to go even though he hasn’t drunk anything since the last time, as if his body is inventing its own liquid, when you’re approaching forty perhaps you start to melt internally.

He is about to say something smart in reply, like that newspapers are better than the internet because you can’t roll up the internet and hit someone in the face with it, but he doesn’t have time.

Louisa nods cheerfully. Ted does nothing, because of course he’s already sunk into the ground and burned up in a river of lava.

That she said ‘I believe in you’ when you said ‘I love you.’ When you’ve been raped, that’s pretty much the biggest thing you can do, I think. Believing in someone, like really… believe in them. Trust them. Especially a boy.”

Ali’s dad just loved having fun. He was good at dancing and drinking wine, but even better at not opening bills.

He didn’t want Ali to call him ‘Dad,’ he wanted to be called ‘Buddy,’ because he didn’t want to be an adult.

Because adults like him don’t understand that adults have to be adults so that c...

remembers her telling him she always slept with a knife under her pillow. Ted was so naive that he asked if that wasn’t dangerous, didn’t she cut herself on it while she was asleep? Ali just smiled and said that was the cutest thing she’d ever heard.