My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

“He used to say that art is coincidence. A beautiful painting is the sum total of a person, what has happened to them, blessings and

Art is coincidence,”

“Life doesn’t give us purpose. We give life purpose.”

“Real life isn’t like comic books,” Ted says there

“The next day, when we went to school, Ali realized that I had never said what superpower I wanted. So she asked, and I lied and said I wanted super speed.” “Why did you lie?” Louisa wonders. “Because I was afraid I’d cry if I told the truth.” “What would you have wanted to say?” “I wanted to be able to stop time. So my mom would never lose my dad, so Joar wouldn’t get beaten by his old man, so… so I would never run out of people.”

“He liked Batman best: ‘I wear a mask. And that mask, it’s not to hide who I am, but to create who I am.’ ” Louisa covers her face with her hair

“Fish and I liked Batman. He was an orphan as well.”

“If you kill him, that doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a weapon.”

“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,” she replies.

Ted looks at his watch, for the first time in his life he wants time to go faster, only someone who still has all their people left wants to stop time.

When you’re fourteen years old, a single person can be like wind beneath a butterfly’s wings. “Art is coincidence, love is chaos,” Ted says.

“You know this is why male serial killers always get caught, right? DNA everywhere!

But today he can’t read a single word, because in the face of death grown men are like children, we think that if we close our eyes, we become invisible.

We imagine that if we don’t open the newspaper, nothing terrible can have happened yet.

I’m sorry you didn’t have a better childhood. It isn’t your fault.”

“You were probably good at it.” “What do you base that on?” he snorts, more unpleasantly than he actually means to. “You weren’t the one that student was trying to stab. You got hurt trying to protect someone else. All the teachers I’ve ever met would have run away.”

“But I don’t think the most important thing for an artist is being able to draw, but having something to say,” he says, more to the sky than to her.

“No. It isn’t hard at all. You loved each other so much that you were scared of accidentally breaking each other.”

could never have lived there on my own. I would have frozen to death in that apartment without his eyes on me.”

“I got the money from your bag when you were in the bathroom earlier,” Louisa goes on, as if she’s now expecting an apology. “So… you stole my money?” Ted asks. “It isn’t theft when you’re friends!” Louisa exclaims, as if the very idea is shocking.

His mom always thought her son would end up an artist, but she was wrong, he changed the world instead.

“Elves can’t fly, you idiot,”

his mother had said about wings, and about all children being born with them.

“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.”

“Picasso said it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a whole lifetime to learn to paint like a child.”

“I don’t have tattoos, I have scars.”

No one can explain why some fourteen-year-olds want to die. Nature gains nothing from unhappy children, yet they are still walking around everywhere, without the words to describe their anxiety.

Ali and Joar and Ted were fragile too, but the artist was like a paper boat heading for a waterfall.

“She never wanted to be a mother.” That was the kindest thing the artist could remember his dad saying about him, because at least he never said that he didn’t want to be a dad.

Other children prayed to God, but Ted prayed to the demons, because maybe God decided which people would die, but the demons in children’s heads decided which ones had the strength to live. So Ted prayed loudly into the darkness, for mercy, for the demons to let go of his friend.

But instead the Owl chose cruelty. He mocked him. It doesn’t take any strength at all to crush someone’s self-confidence if you know where to stomp. The artist did what he always did, he pulled his hood up, stood up, and fled for the door. But the Owl stood in the way, grabbed the boy by the arm, and roared: “YOU’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE!”

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

Ted had prayed to the demons for mercy, the demons had laughed, but maybe Heaven had listened. Because that day the wings grew out.

Dear Lord, he hardly likes people, and of course babies are the very worst-functioning versions of people.

“Babies teach us not to be scared of death. That’s how we realize we can’t wish for eternal life.

Do you want to hear it? Okay: you shouldn’t get angry with lazy people. They haven’t done anything!”

“Why should I hurry up?” he asks. “Because it sounds like a story that isn’t going to end happily for everyone. And it’s easier to cope with sad endings if you’re holding a baby,” Louisa replies.

‘Because I want to know what’s happening inside you! Because you happened to me! You happen to me every second I’m alive!’ ”

“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls!

“I can’t paint the way the art teacher wants. I can’t paint things. There’s something wrong with my brain.” “That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,”

Then he quoted Frida Kahlo, who said she painted flowers so they wouldn’t die. And Leonardo da Vinci, who said that art was never finished, only abandoned.

One day, many years later, a woman wrote in a newspaper that the most beautiful thing about the artist’s pictures was that they felt inevitable. “Once you’ve seen his art, you can’t imagine a world without it,”

Christian’s mother remembered screaming into the phone when the police called, but not how it sounded, her ears seemed deaf afterward. She hardly remembered the funeral, only the coffin, because all she could think was: How can Christian fit in there? He was far too big, her whole world.

But they were lucky, they were wrong. The first day of the vacation Joar found a damn ad in a damn newspaper, about a damn art competition. That

The mother comes back from the bathroom, as grateful as only a parent who has been able to go to the bathroom undisturbed can be. She gently takes the sleeping child from Louisa’s arms. Louisa looks like she’s freezing when her body is alone again.

“Would you swap those two years for a whole childhood? I mean, like, a happy childhood, only with different friends?” Louisa wonders. “I wouldn’t have swapped those idiots for a thousand childhoods.”

“What I hate most isn’t that people die. What I hate most is that they’re dead. That I’m alive, without them.”

But I think she liked fiction better than history, to be honest. She talked much more about myths than facts.”

Because he would never do that to her. Every time her phone rings, she still thinks someone has died.

“Don’t run. When you want to disappear, you walk, like you’re just going to the bathroom!”