Infinite Books

What a great gift friendship is—for everybody but especially for teenagers in their formative years, when they search for understanding and acceptance, trying to find themselves and moving between excitement and depression, often in a single day. Fredrik Backman’s “My Friends” is a book about friendship that helps them accept that being different is okay.

Imagine a picture – later hung as a masterpiece in a museum – of three teenagers sitting on a pier, the blue water, a sunny day, and a feeling of lightness and beauty in the surrounding air.  This moment was caught in time by one of the teenagers who, although not painted in the picture, felt like he was all around his friends. He painted the moment and the feeling. This was his gift to his friends and later to the world as the first painting of a famous artist.

The story is told in two timelines: first, it is a memory of one’s youth, but it’s far from idyllic. There is domestic abuse and cruelty, and yet the evil is not met with more evil but with finding refuge in friendship.  Then we move to the present time when the teenagers become adults, and one of them, Ted, tells their story to Louisa, a free-spirited, troublesome foster child, now an eighteen-year-old girl who is very much at the beginning of her road as an artist. During their train ride, Louisa learns about Joar, Ali, Ted, and Kimkim, the artist, and it seems like summer has come back now in the quiet interior of the train, with the famous picture resting on the seat.

It’s also a book about art, its meaning, and how it can save people. The initial encouragement given to Kimkim by his friend, Joar, saves the artist (this is the name we hear about Kimkim first), but later results in a chain reaction – the artist meets Louisa, who is “one of us,” as he says. Later, Louisa meets another budding artist teenager, and the story repeats as the next ripple on the water that four teenagers had looked at years earlier.  Ultimately, Ted’s story has a significant impact, and the gifts of friendship and art are joined by a gift of storytelling – something that Ted and the book author, Fredrik Backman, possess in abundance.

MY FRIENDS by Fredrik Backman, Atria Books, 2025