My Friends by Fredrik Backman
Four 14-year-olds have a summer to
remember, with friends, bullies, and dysfunctional families. One becomes a
famous artist. 25 years later, the artist gifts a foster child a priceless painting.
A beautiful novel of art, love, and friendship.
C. Jat is a 14-year-old artist who,
after heroic encouragement by his friends, becomes famous. When he dies at 39,
he gives his most valuable painting to “one of us,” Louisa (18), who grew up in
foster care. Ted cares for the artists and is responsible for transferring the
painting to Louisa. Louisa and Ted travel back to the artist’s neighborhood,
while Ted recounts the 25-year-old adventures of the four friends. The other
two friends are Joar and Ali. The summer, the travels, and the discussion
unveil truths about art, love, and friendship.
QUOTES
On rich people: Around the men and women, waitstaff in white shirts circulate,
serving hors d’oeuvres, because rich people love tiny food. Everything else
should be big, except for taxes and sandwiches.
Fear of swimming: Her mother had drunk herself to death. Drowned from the inside.
A child’s brain is so imaginative. Louisa heard this but didn’t grow up afraid
of alcohol, just horribly afraid of swimming.
The summer without boredom: It managed to be love and friendship, miraculously loud laughter,
and magnificently stupid decisions. They put fireworks in mailboxes, rode
shopping carts down the steepest hill in town, and tried to dry wet socks in a
toaster, because what else are you supposed to do when you’re fourteen? Die of
boredom?
On getting old: You know you’re old when you have to use soap on your head and
shampoo on your ass.
Ali sleeping with a knife: He remembers her telling him she always slept with a knife under
her pillow. Ted was so naive that he asked if that wasn’t dangerous, didn’t she
cut herself on it while she was asleep? Ali just smiled and said that was the
cutest thing she’d ever heard.
Joke: “I know a joke! My nephew told it to me yesterday! Do you want
to hear it? Okay: you shouldn’t get angry with lazy people. They haven’t done
anything!”
Libraries: “In a library. You don’t have to put up with reality there. It’s
as if thousands of strangers have given away their imaginary friends, they’re
sitting on the shelves and calling to you as you walk past. There’s an author
called Donna Tartt who describes why a person falls in love with art: ‘It’s a
secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.’ That’s what
libraries feel like for me.”
Art just needs friends: Art doesn’t require training, dear child, art just needs
friends.” Then she crouched down in front of his painting, and when she saw the
skulls next to his name, she sobbed so hard that no one really knew what to do.
One of us: So Louisa tells him everything: about a teenager in an alleyway
and a painting on the wall of a building. She tells him about the speed a heart
can beat at, which no one who’s stopped being young can remember. She talks on
and on, and Ted listens, and Heaven leans closer to the roof of the house to
hear. Louisa tells him about art so beautiful that just seeing it makes you too
big for your body, a sort of happiness so overwhelming that it’s almost
unbearable. “When I was standing in front of that painting, I forgot to be
alone, I forgot to be afraid, do you understand?” she says. Of course Ted
understands. If you’ve experienced it once, you never forget it. If not, there
probably isn’t any way to explain. “If that artist is one of us, really one of
us, you have to do whatever you can to help,” he says. “I know,” she says
proudly.
Chapter 27 introduces Basquiat,
who might be the inspiration for the book. “Basquiat first achieved notoriety
in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz. By the
early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums
internationally. At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney
Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective
of his artwork in 1992. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black
skull with red-and-yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million,
becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.”
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