My Friends by Fredrik BackmanMy rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
🌅 My Friends is a sweeping, messy, beautiful exploration of friendship, grief, art, and the way love reshapes itself across decades. It is by turns hilarious, devastating, and profoundly hopeful, the kind of novel that makes you both mourn what you’ve lost and cherish what you still have.
The story threads together two timelines. In the present, Louisa, a young woman adrift after aging out of foster care and losing her best friend, discovers a world-famous painting whose small, easily overlooked figures pull her in with magnetic force. Her obsession brings her into the orbit of Ted, a man haunted by ghosts of his own, and together they retrace the origins of that painting and the group of friends who inspired it.
Those friends—Joar, Ali, Ted himself, and a gifted artist—first collided as teenagers, each carrying wounds from home yet finding refuge in one another. Their summer together was full of mischief, awkward bravery, and fierce loyalty, and it reverberates decades later in ways that none of them could have anticipated. The book reveals not only the story behind a painting but also what it means to carry the weight of memory: how grief can sit beside laughter, how trauma can coexist with resilience, and how love—platonic, romantic, messy, imperfect—leaves its mark long after circumstances scatter us.
Backman’s strength has always been his ability to write dialogue that feels both absurdly funny and brutally honest, often within the same paragraph. My Friends doubles down on that gift. There are fart jokes and aching meditations on mortality; there are passages that made me laugh out loud and others that stopped me cold with lines like, “That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward.”
It’s not flawless. The first half drags at times, relying a bit too heavily on exposition rather than lived-in scenes. In fact, I put it down and went over to a couple of other books for a few days before coming back to finish it. Something about the characters kept pulling me back, and the payoff was extraordinary. The book’s remaining pages flew by, filled with unforgettable moments of raw humanity. Content warnings are worth noting: it deals with grief, depression, abuse, and self-harm, though always with empathy and sensitivity.
After I finished, I had an urge to reach out to old friends, hug my family tighter, and even revisit the memories I usually keep at arm’s length. Like the painting at the story's center, My Friends isn’t really about what’s on the canvas; it’s about the people who made it possible and the stories we carry forward.
Overall, this book is a love letter to found family, a meditation on the courage to live fully, and a reminder that art is humanity’s rebellion against forgetting. I rounded up to 5 stars from 4.5 because, although I highlighted the heck out of the book, I wasn’t crying buckets or moved beyond words. I do feel it deserves props as a shoutout to friendship, a tale of grief, and love, both heartbreaking and hopeful.
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Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second.
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⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.5 / 5 stars
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