When I call Fredrik Backman from halfway across the world – he in his Stockholm apartment, me in my New York one – he says something I don’t expect.
The “Anxious People” author is soft-spoken, even giving me a preemptive apology in case he needs to argue in Swedish with his barking dog, whose real name is kept secret but whom fans know as “The Donkey.” Backman is notoriously private, especially about his family, averse to the fame that comes with having several international bestsellers, including one that was made into a Tom Hanks movie (“A Man Called Otto”). Interviews and public appearances make him anxious. He expressed as much in a viral video from Simon & Schuster’s Centennial last year.
“Maybe this is the last thing I’ll ever publish,” he tells me when I ask about his inspiration for his latest novel, “My Friends,” out now from Simon & Schuster. If that ends up being the case, he says, he wants to say something that leaves a mark and inspires young people.
I think about objecting, placating, trying to convince him that the world needs more Backman books, now more than ever. But I stop, because Backman isn’t saying this in search of any sort of praise or compliment. He’s saying it because it’s real – human – which is exactly how his books read anyway.
Fredrik Backman struggles with ‘the machine of the industry’
When he showed the first draft of “My Friends” to his close circle, the reaction was lukewarm. The story was dark, too dark, his wife told him. It reflected two years of confidence and writing troubles.
“I had a really long period where I thought ‘I’m going to retire from writing,’” Backman says. “But I’m not going to retire from writing. I’m going to retire from publishing books, because I just felt that this is taking a little bit too much out of me. I’m not handling the pressure of it.”
I ask him if he still feels that way, now that “My Friends” has turned into something deeper (and more hopeful) than he originally wrote. He says he grapples with it every day, struggles with being caught in “the machine of the industry.”
Backman isn’t the only author who feels this way. After the worldwide success of “Fourth Wing,” romantasy author Rebecca Yarros told Elle Magazine she was taking a break because writing, publishing and marketing the series “drove (her) body to a place that was untenable.” Colleen Hoover, the author behind the BookTok bestseller “It Ends With Us,” had to cancel her book tour because of stress-related health issues.
In 2021, Backman inked a four-book deal with Simon & Schuster UK for his English-language books: his Beartown series closer “The Winners” and three standalone novels, one of which presumably is “My Friends.”
“I’ve always struggled with this part of it, the being interviewed, going on tour, being somewhat – in the smallest form of the word – a celebrity,” he says. “I’ve always struggled with being a public figure and people having expectations of you and having preconceived notions of you. I’ve always struggled with that. I am not good with crowds; I’m not good with strangers. I don’t give a good first impression to people. I’m comfortable with maybe seven people.”
Backman knows he’s privileged to write fulltime, telling me about “proper jobs” he’s had operating forklifts for 10-12 hours a day, waking up so sore he couldn’t extend his fingers. He’s telling me this, he says, not to garner sympathy but because he wants the industry to be careful with how they treat young writers. Writers are highly sensitive by nature.
“You’re not supposed to be a balanced, high-functioning individual because that’s not what makes you a great writer,” Backman says. “People expect you to be able to shut that off and say ‘Yeah, but now we need you to think about marketing, meeting about marketing, thinking about your brand.’
“It’s fine when you put that pressure on someone like me, who is 44 years old and I have kids, and I have a life and I have a good support system around me and I’ve been doing this for 15 years. But when that pressure starts mounting up on someone in their 20s, I think that’s a lot to ask of someone who makes their living off of talking to imaginary friends.”
To some degree, intense marketing is a necessary evil under capitalism. Books need to sell to keep publishers and authors afloat, and a good campaign can be the difference between putting food on the table or not. The landscape is also shifting. As social media, namely BookTok, continues to drive sales, there’s an increasing push for authors themselves to be a brand, rather than their work alone. We have access to authors’ personal lives in a way we never have before.
Some authors thrive through marketing, touring, speaking and signing. But not all.
“These people that you’re dealing with are very sensitive creatures, and you can break them if you push them too hard,” Backman says.
Fredrik Backman wrote ‘My Friends’ for the young dreamers
If “My Friends” was his last book, Backman tells me, what would he want to say?
The story is told in two alternating timelines. The past perspective is about four childhood friends and one transformative summer. Their bond inspires a painting that eventually becomes, decades later, the most famous painting in the world. In the present, a teenager clings tightly to a postcard of the painting. It’s her most cherished possession in the world. Then she finds herself in unexpected ownership of the original. Her cross-country journey to learn how the artwork came to be connects surprising roads in her own life and the painting’s subjects.
If our discussion about publishing is a critique of the capitalistic churn of people as commodities, “My Friends” says the same thing about art. Backman, whose wife is an art buff, frequents museums with his family. He loathes that art is hidden away and sold as capital. He wants to teach young people that it belongs to them.
Young people are a driving force in Backman’s work. In “A Man Called Ove,” a grieving, depressed elderly man finds reason to live after he encounters a young family next door. The heart of “My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry” is a lovable 7-year-old. Even the books with adult characters show that we’re all just big kids on the inside, figuring it out as we go.
I ask him if hope is something he wants to share with his readers. That’s how I always feel when I close a Backman book. He looks for a different feeling instead.
“At the end of the night (when) you’re just exhausted and someone in your life who loves you and cares about you just turns around and looks at you and says, ‘You did good. You did good. I can see that you struggled, and I can see that you did your best,’” Backman says. “That’s what I’m looking for in my books, and maybe that’s interpreted by some people as hope, and maybe it’s redemption and maybe it’s something else. But I’m looking for that. I’m looking for you to close the book at the final page and feel like it’s OK.”
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Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].
