My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

“The trick is relaxing and making all your muscles soft, that makes you slippery, pretend you’re a bar of soap!” Fish had explained, and when Louisa pointed out that bar soap isn’t particularly soft, Fish had snapped: “Liquid soap, then! Stop spoiling my story!”

“You can’t trust men, Louisa, they’re far too easy to love.”

Fish was always in love with someone, her crushes were like the drugs she took, happiness on credit.

She tried to seem cynical, always telling Louisa not to trust anyone, but deep down Fish’s big problem was that she believed in happy endings.

she did the most magical thing she could think of: she broke into a library. Because that was where all the fairy tales were.

It was crazy, really, that Fish loved quiet places yet was friends with Louisa, who always needed noise. Who always was noise, actually.

The curse is the same for everyone who has loved someone who died of an overdose: we think that if we could just have been with our human every moment of every day, then it would never have happened. It never stops being our fault.

She stopped trying after that, loneliness was better than disappointment.

few nights later a cleaner arrived at the library, just as the sun was rising. She found Fish curled up on the floor among the fairy tales. The policeman who called the foster home said the doctor had declared it an overdose, but said that Fish had drifted off peacefully in her sleep. Her body full of happiness on credit.

good. A bad foster home teaches a child a lot of things, but most of all to identify danger. She

You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.

Sometimes he imagines that mankind invented God just to have someone to be angry with, because you can’t be angry with a dad who’s dead, not even a little bit. Ted

He didn’t necessarily want to be with his people, just near them.

Lucky children often ask what the most dangerous animal in the world is, but all other children already know. It isn’t the lion or the hippopotamus or the snake or the spider or the shark. The most dangerous creature on the planet is, and has always been, a young man. And the worst thing about a young man? That until very recently he was just a boy. No one gets any warning when he stops being one.

He starts to adjust the tape holding them together and replies: “It suits you, that laugh. I’m glad they didn’t manage to take it from you.” “Who?” “All the people who have tried.”

This is exactly what we’re built for. Throughout our entire existence we have been on the run, first from wild animals, then from each other.

“I mean, God talks to you, right? Is it like watching TV, or is it more like talking on the phone?” The corners of the minister’s mouth danced at that, albeit reluctantly. “I’m probably the one who does most of the talking, I have to admit.”

“Perhaps you should ask God yourself?” Joar stared at him in genuine surprise, as if he were expecting the minister to hold out a tin can on a piece of string, with God sitting at the other end. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?” The minister gestured amiably toward the roof. “God belongs to you as much as to me. You can ask whatever you want.” Joar pursed his lips thoughtfully for a long, long time. Then he looked up at the roof, cleared his throat seriously, and said: “Okay. Can you stop giving people cancer, you fucking bastard?”

Then Ali looked at Joar and did the kindest thing the boys had ever seen her do: she stayed quiet and let him win. Just that once. You couldn’t possibly love anyone more when you’re fourteen years old.

Human beings are capable of such unbelievable stupidity. We speak of the birth of a child as a miracle, but really the miracle is everything that comes after.

“The dinosaurs died out, but you and I and all these idiots managed to survive? We do nothing but try to find ways to destroy everything that’s keeping us alive, but we’re still here?”

People say that anxiety is fear for no reason, but Ted’s brain is very helpful when it comes to providing suggestions.

Once he read a book that said that people with neuropsychiatric disorders need to “make friends with their brain,” but Ted and Ted’s brain are not friends, they’re classmates, forced to do a group assignment called “life” together. And it’s not going great.

“Seven children. All grown-up now. Two dead. But: have grandchildren now! And Albert! A person needs to keep something alive, you understand? Otherwise: we are not people.”

“The birds are like tourists. They screech and make a mess, but you’re not allowed to shoot them…”

“I read it in a comic. It said that people can smell rain more clearly than a shark can detect the smell of blood,” Ted had replied.

Time after time, we fail at being human beings.

because that was the worst sort of gossip: the sort that is disguised as concern.

so they could stay there in the darkness where the world smelled of popcorn and always had happy endings.

He didn’t want anyone to tell his mom that he ought to start playing on a team, because they couldn’t afford it, children who played ice hockey in their town didn’t get their electricity cut off and didn’t use newspapers as toilet paper at the end of the month.

Joar wouldn’t have wanted to play on a team anyway. They were run by a bunch of angry dads shouting at their kids, and if Joar needed to be around a raging fucking moron, he had one at home.

But she didn’t dare leave her husband, and Joar couldn’t leave her. Their prison was invisible.

“Did you know that birds don’t have nests? Not for themselves, I mean. They only build them for their kids,” Joar said.

“Did Ted tell you that?” his mom smiled. “His brain is like poop. Everything sticks!”

When his mom laughed really hard, she would fart, no one apart from Joar knew that, because no one apart from Joar made her laugh like that. “Open the window! Open the window! You’re going to murder the bird!” he coughed with...

“There’s nothing like the sea. Now your skin knows that. Now it’s going to miss it, always,” he promises.

“Where do you want your ashes scattered, then?” Ted thinks for a good while before deciding: “In a library. You don’t have to put up with reality there. It’s as if thousands of strangers have given away their imaginary friends, they’re sitting on the shelves and calling to you as you walk past.

There’s an author called Donna Tartt who describes why a person falls in love with art: ‘It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.’ That’s what libraries feel like for me.”

“It’s incredibly difficult being a mom, Louisa. It’s difficult being a human being.

But there’s no harder person on the planet than a romantic with a broken heart.”

When your dad got sick?” she asks. He considers his answer for a long time. “Yes. But perhaps it didn’t break. Maybe it got worn out.

Ted explains that children know hardly anything about their parents, even if they live with them their whole lives. Because all we know about them is as moms and dads, nothing about who they were before that. We never saw them young, when they still fantasized about all the things that could happen, instead of regretting all the things that never did.

so around here young men didn’t feel that they’d chosen a life, just that they had been allocated one.

Life was an allotted period of time, like a prison sentence.

“I said you’re not a bad person. You just pick bad friends. You pick people who are worse than you, because you think that’s all you deserve. You ought to pick people who are better than you.”

movies, Ted. It’s different in real life. But Dad once told me, when he was really fucking drunk, that he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

That’s an extra cruelty that cancer brings, Ted thought, when you’re waiting for everything to go back to normal again. Until one day you realize that the illness has become the new normal.

“A violent man is a sickness for all around him. Violence is a plague that spreads through everybody it comes into contact with…,”

Violence isn’t a genetic illness, violence is a contagion, it passes from skin to skin. The heart gets infected. It’s exhausting to always be angry when you’re a child, constantly having to tense your body not to cry, because you know that if you start, you’ll never be able to stop.

“Mom, you once said I had a good singing voice, so you obviously can’t be trusted!”