My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

by Fredrik Backman

That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”

People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. “They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.” As if that’s how oppression works.

The first time the scarf caught the girl’s attention, Elsa had simply assumed that the girl was a Slytherin. Only after she’d smacked Elsa in the face, ripped her scarf, and thrown it in a toilet had Elsa grown conscious of the fact that the girl hadn’t read Harry Potter at all. She knew who he was, of course, everyone knows who Harry Potter is, but she hadn’t read the books. She didn’t even understand the most basic symbolism of a Gryffindor scarf. And while Elsa didn’t want to be elitist or anything, how could one be expected to reason with a person like that? Muggles.

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

Mum shrugs. “I taught myself to fix things on my own, that’s all. Because I didn’t trust your grandmother.

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living,

right to get a bit bloody eccentric now and then.” Mum, of course, was very angry at Granny about the whole plastic tree thing, because she likes the smell of a real spruce tree and always said that the plastic tree was something Granny had duped Elsa about. 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.

But if you see the shit those boys saw, you need some help when you get back. And this country’s so bloody willing to put billions into weapons and fighter jets, but when those boys come home and they’ve seen the shit they’ve seen, no one can be bothered to listen to them even for five minutes.”

“There’s this poem about an old man who says he can’t be loved, so he doesn’t mind, sort of, being disliked instead. As long as someone sees him,”