Review of My Friends by Fredrik Backman

I liked the unlikely modern-day friendship and depth of connection, and I love a best-friend story, but the past timeline and immense, ongoing influence of the decades-old, early-teen friendship didn't hold significant emotional power for me.

I really liked Fredrik Backman's gentle, funny, lovely novel A Man Called Ove. Based on a collective love for that title, my book club dug into his novel Beartown--and there was a dramatic split between those who loved that story and those who did not. I found it incredibly frustrating, overly dramatic, and somewhat facile, and after reading it I took a break from Backman books.

But I was intrigued by the premise of My Friends, his most recent work, and some reader friends urged me to give him another try.

In the novel we follow young Louisa, an aspiring artist, and her inspiration, a dying artist with an extensive backstory centering around a group of dedicated friends and a pivotal summer in their early teens. The book repeatedly tracks back in time to that summer that changed everything, and it alternates peeks into the past with present-day events and an unlikely modern-day friendship that comes out of painful loss.

At the center of the story is a work of art, and in repeated trips back in time, we see the friends' various painful young adulthoods and the inspiration for the painting. I felt that some of the potential power of the youthful scenes was diminished by the fact that they are presented in visits to the past, with private jokes that made me feel a little bit like an outsider and group catchphrases that felt self-consciously invented to serve as shorthand for best-friendship.

The youthful experiences are repeatedly said to be life-changing, and the impact of them is largely summarized in the present. The immensity of this short period in the characters' early teenhood is repeatedly purported to have ongoing and life-changing power.

The current-day storyline is largely focused upon a clumsy, heartwarming, lovely coming-together of opposites: unexpected friends who need each other and who quickly become as close as family. Watching this relationship develop gave it power and made it hit home for me in a way that the revisited moments from decades earlier did not.

Louisa, who has just turned eighteen, has had her own significant difficulties and loss, and while she is naïve in many ways, she is necessarily jaded in others. She has struggled to stay safe in foster homes and has existed with significant uncertainty for many years. This added to my feeling that the extreme emotional turmoil Louisa experiences as she hears the years-old story of the young friends felt overwrought to me. While she might empathetically feed into the depth of feeling described to her and suffered by her artistic idol, I was surprised by--and distracted by--the sobbing episodes she enters into during the story's low points.

As a young artist, it is charming that Louisa is deeply affected by the power of the artwork that was made decades earlier and the circumstances around its creation. Is it plausible that she is really one of the only ones in the world who seems to notice that there are figures in the painting and not simply water? Is it cute or is it overreaching to allow her to have the innate sense that the often-overlooked figures were, specifically, laughing at one of their farts (which turns out to be the case)? I enjoy heartwarming, inexplicable connections and spot-on intuition, but in My Friends, overly convenient instances like these felt unnecessary and irritatingly unlikely.

More Stories about Best Friends

You might want to check out these other Bossy reviews of stories about best friends.