Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

“Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

This is, in many ways, one of the most recurring themes throughout the whole Beartown book trilogy. People often ask me why I chose hockey, and not another sport, to write about, and the answer is this: Hockey demands everything. It’s so hard to do, it’s so incredibly time consuming, and you can’t do it alone. So if you don’t love it beyond all reason to begin with…forget it. Go do something easier, less demanding. If you want to play hockey it’s BECAUSE it is hard. It requires love, all of it. And love makes you sensitive and easily offended. I did my best to explain throughout the book series that sometimes that’s why people involved in it make really bad decisions, thinking that they’re protecting the sport or the team or the town or the family. It’s all intertwined. There’s no separation between this sport and everything else. It demands too much. That’s why I chose it. And that’s why the dedication to start THE WINNERS, the last part of the trilogy, is: “To you who talk too much and sing too loud and cry too often and love something in life way more than you should.”

What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.

These two quotes are part of the same, longer, quote. It’s attributed to Mother Theresa, but as far as I’ve understood it she actually only wrote it on a wall of her orphanage in Calcutta. The real author of it is not entirely clear, but Kent M. Kieth claimed it was an interpretation of a poem he wrote in the 1960s. In BEARTOWN, Amat has it written on the wall in his room, because his mother had it read to her by a nurse when he was born. I felt it said something about their relationship, and about Amat’s personality. That’s where his fire comes from.

“The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

I fell in love with sports and literature at the same time, around 4 or 5 years old, because I figured out that these were the two things that could most easily help me escape the real world. And they work the same way, they’re both gone in an instant. They’re only here and now. And then you’re on to the next one, chasing the next emotion or experience. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the sadness of that, the feeling that “there’s nothing eternal and therefore no meaning to it,” but this part of the book is about me telling myself that…well…that’s the whole point, stupid. Moments. That’s all we get. Grab on and hang in.

Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.

I heard a Swedish football (not the American kind, the rest-of-the-world kind) player use the blanket example to explain how his team felt they couldn’t defend all the opposing players in a superior team. He said, “you pull the blanket up, your toes get cold. You pull it down, your chest gets cold.” And it kind of stuck with me, until years later when I wrote BEARTOWN and felt that if Mira (she’s called “Kira” in the American and English versions of the book) tried to explain what it’s like to be a mother she would probably use a sports metaphor. So I landed on this.

Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

Sometimes I honestly don’t know if there is any more powerful force in the human brain than bitterness. There’s almost nothing I fear more than surrendering to that. Because it consumes you in a way that is 100% destructive. It’s like rust on metal. I think I wrote this passage with a good friend in mind, who always says, “Leave a bad situation or a bad relationship angry, that’s fine, but never stay until you’re bitter.” Anger can fuel good things, I think. Bitterness can only fuel bad.

It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.

Well. I have two kids. I think almost everything I write is me trying to figure out how the hell to not mess up at being a parent all the time.

For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

An extremely strong and incredibly brave person who helped me write BEARTOWN by sitting down and telling me her story, read this when I’d written it and said, “Yes, that’s it, that’s what I meant.” It’s still the most important compliment I’ve ever had about my writing.

“That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

This connects to Sune’s quote that, “culture is as much about what we encourage as about what we permit.” I had been interviewing so many hockey people at this point, players and coaches and general managers and board members and so many of them talked about “culture” in a way that was only about practicing hard and winning games. And then I met one person who said, “It’s funny that when we talk about a winning culture we talk a lot about rules, but almost never about ethics. We talk a lot about how to train, but almost never about how to behave. One would assume they’re part of the same thing, no?” And that stayed with me for a long time, and that’s where that whole dialogue comes from.

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.

I wrote this after reading a lot about herd mentality. I couldn’t really write this story without trying to understand that part of human behavior. I think I was also heavily influenced here by the many, many coaches in different sports who had told me that the most effective tool to really unite a team is to create an outside enemy. One coach said that even if it wasn’t true, he always tried to convince his players that, “no one believes in us! Everyone has counted us out! No one WANTS us to win! They all HATE us!” He didn’t want players, he said, he wanted warriors. I wrote that down and it translated to the way I later tried to describe the whole community. Hate is easy.

And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.

I think this connects to the quote above this: “Hate is simple.” I spent a lot of time on social media while writing Beartown and…well…this is what I came back with.

What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.

If I can only pick one passage from all three books in the Beartown trilogy that would sum up the theme of all of them, it would be: “What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.” To me, that’s what the whole story was about. You, me, our friends, our neighbors, the people at the grocery store, everyone at the ice rink…one choice after another after another after another…good or bad: That’s our community. That’s all it is.