My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

by Fredrik Backman

Elsa is seven, going on eight. She knows she isn’t especially good at being seven. She knows she’s different. Her headmaster says she needs to “fall into line” in order to achieve “a better fit with her peers.” Other adults describe her as “very grown-up for her age.” Elsa knows this is just another way of saying “massively annoying for her age,” because they only tend to say this when she corrects them for mispronouncing “déjà vu” or not being able to tell the difference between “me” and “I” at the end of a sentence. Smart-asses usually can’t, hence the “grown-up for her age” comment, generally said with a strained smile at her parents. As if she has a mental impairment, as if Elsa has shown them up by not being totally thick just because she’s seven. And that’s why she doesn’t have any friends except Granny. Because all the other seven-year-olds in her school are as idiotic as seven-year-olds tend to be, but Elsa is different.

Because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes. And anyone who doesn’t agree needs their head examined.

their argument about the difference between “sexual harassment” and “basic appreciation of a perfectly splendid ass.”

“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

The Monster looks at her as if she just asked him to get naked, roll in saliva, and then run through a postage stamp factory with the lights off. Or maybe not exactly like that. But more or less. He

In Miamas an interpreter is a creature most easily described as a combination between a goat and a chocolate cookie. Interpreters are extremely gifted linguistically, as well as excellent to grill on the barbecue. At least they were until Elsa became a vegetarian, after which Granny was not allowed to mention them anymore.

“Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do,”

For no stories can live without children listening to them.

Because the Noween was breeding fears in the caves. Fears need to be handled carefully, because threats just make them grow bigger. So every time a parent somewhere threatened a child, it worked as fertilizer. “Soon,” a child said somewhere, and then a parent yelled, “No, nooow! Or I’ll—” And, bang, another fear was hatched in one of the Noween’s caves.

Instead the knights did the only thing you can do with fears: they laughed at them. Loud, defiant laughter. And then all the fears were turned to stone, one by one.

“Don’t fight with monsters, for you can become one. If you look into the abyss for long enough, the abyss looks into you.”

But I think it could mean that if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.”

“Granny always said: ‘Don’t kick the shit, it’ll go all over the place!’ ”

For while Miamas is made of fantasy, Mimovas is made of love. Without love there is no music, and without music there is no Mimovas, and the Chosen One was the most beloved in the whole kingdom. So if the shadows had taken him, it would eventually have led to the downfall of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. If Mimovas falls then Mirevas falls, and if Mirevas falls then Miamas falls, and if Miamas falls then Miaudacas falls, and if Miaudacas falls then Miploris falls. Because without music there can’t be any dreams, and without dreams there can’t be any fairy tales, and without fairy tales there can’t be any courage, and without courage no one would be able to bear any sorrows, and without music and dreams and fairy tales and courage and sorrow there would only be one kingdom left in the Land-of-Almost-Awake: Mibatalos. But Mibatalos can’t live alone, because the warriors there would be worthless without the other kingdoms, because they’d no longer have anything to fight for.

Because it was Granny who had told Elsa about the Christmas tree dance in Miamas, and no one who’s heard that story wants to have a spruce tree that someone has amputated and sold into slavery. In Miamas, spruce trees are living, thinking creatures with—considering that they’re coniferous trees—an unaccountably strong interest in home design. They don’t live in the forest but in the southern districts of Miamas, which have become quite trendy in recent years, and they often work in the advertising industry and wear scarves indoors. And once every year, soon after the first snow has fallen, all the spruce trees gather in the big square below the castle and compete for the right to stay in someone’s house over Christmas. The spruce trees choose the houses, not the other way around, and the choice is decided by a dance competition. In the olden days they used to have duels about it, but spruce trees are generally such bad shots that it used to take forever. So now they do spruce dancing, which looks a bit unusual, because spruce trees don’t have feet. And if a non–spruce tree wants to imitate a dancing spruce tree, they just jump up and down. It’s quite handy, particularly on a crowded dance floor.

even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits.

Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups are generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy—space exploration, the UN, vaccines, and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can.

“Can you make snow-angels?” asks Elsa when Taxi stops outside the house. “I’m bloody sixty-four years old,” grunts Alf. “That’s not an answer.” Alf turns off Taxi’s engine. “I may be sixty-four years old, but I wasn’t sixty-four when I was born! Course I can make bloody snow-angels!”

And they never talk much about it afterwards. Because certain kinds of friends can be friends without talking much.

she has time to think about an entirely new way of measuring time. This whole thing with eternities and the eternities of fairy tales is becoming a bit unmanageable. There must be something less complicated—blinking, for example, or the beating of a hummingbird’s wings. Someone must have thought about this. She’s going to Wikipedia it when she gets home.

Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.