My Friends by Fredrik Backman

Published 2025 · 436 pages · 128,862 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Coming-of-Age

How hard is My Friends to read?

My Friends scores 33 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 24 out of 100
Backman writes in plain, contemporary Swedish rendered into equally plain English by Neil Smith, with no specialized jargon and no archaic diction. A teenager reads him without a dictionary. Simpler than The Great Gatsby (45), closer to accessible contemporary fiction.
Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
Short, punchy sentences, frequent one-line paragraphs, and deliberate fragments for emphasis. Backman occasionally strings clauses into a rolling aphorism, but the grammar never taxes the reader. Direct, like 1984 (35), often even sparser.
Abstraction: 36 out of 100
The story stays concrete, a train, a pier, a painting, yet Backman's narrator constantly steps back to muse on grief, friendship, and what art is for. These asides lift it above pure plot toward the emotional abstraction of Remains of the Day (50) without ever losing the ground under the characters' feet.
Information density: 32 out of 100
Plot-driven and generous with white space. Two timelines run in parallel, so a reader tracks a modest cast across past and present, but Backman feeds information slowly and repeats his emotional beats. Denser than a single-thread romance, lighter than layered literary fiction.
Narrative indirection: 34 out of 100
Backman tells you how to feel and names his themes out loud, so most meaning arrives directly. The central mystery, what happened that summer and why the painting matters, is doled out gradually and forces some inference, but nothing like the reconstruction Beloved (50) demands.
Symbolic density: 44 out of 100
The painting One of Us Is Sleeping anchors the book as a legible, load-bearing symbol: four kids on a pier, a single moment made permanent, friendship outliving the people in it. The sea and the rotting jetty carry weight too. Present but single-layered, near To Kill a Mockingbird's mockingbird (45).
Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
Backman means every word. His humor softens the blows rather than undercutting them, and the narrator's sincerity never winks at the reader. Even more earnest than It Ends with Us (35); there is almost no gap between what the text says and what it wants you to feel.
Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
The plot resolves and the emotional arcs land with cathartic force, though Backman leaves grief unhealed and some losses permanent. Closer to genre-satisfying closure (Beach Read, 25) than to open-ended literary fiction, with a bittersweet residue.
Structural complexity: 46 out of 100
Two interwoven timelines, Louisa and Ted's present-day train journey and the friends' lost summer twenty-five years earlier, plus a story-within-a-story as Ted narrates the past, and shifting close-third perspectives. More moving parts than a linear novel, though every shift is signposted; below Gatsby's retrospective layering (55).

How My Friends is regarded

My Friends holds a literary regard score of 27 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where My Friends sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (226 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, My Friends scores 60 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
seventeen years on the planet and it fits inside one bag
Symbol: Formal
Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.
Mythos: Comedy iv (comedy iv)
That’s the happy ending.
Genre: Novel + Romance
And then Ted does something he never thought he would do again. He tells the whole story, right from the beginning.

Where the story of My Friends takes place

  • Unnamed city, trains and a seaside harbor town, Easter week, present day (2020 to 2025), the main setting
  • Run-down harbor town, the summer the four friends were fourteen, "twenty-five years ago" (1998 to 2000)

5 things that are true of My Friends, with the passage for each

  1. Louisa's entire possessions fit in one backpack at age seventeen.

    seventeen years on the planet and it fits inside one bag

  2. The taxi driver who helps Ted and Louisa has seven children.

    Yes, yes, seven children!

  3. Joar sold his own bicycle, a gift from his mother, to buy the paint.

    Joar had sold many bicycles in his life, but that day was the first time he had sold his own.

  4. The artist name C. Jat is made from the initials of the four friends.

    C. Jat. The initials of Christian, Joar, Ali, and Ted.

  5. The competition that started everything was only for children aged thirteen or under.

    But it says . . . maximum age thirteen, Joar.

Scenes in My Friends that Frye would name

45 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
A soft little exhalation through the stubble of his beard, one final little beat of his heart, and then the world is smaller. The artist dies asleep in Ted's arms.
Agon, untitled
She swings the metal pipe and hears it break the first man’s arm, then hits the second man as hard as she can across his calves Louisa saves Ted by fighting off the muggers.
Pathos, untitled
Early one morning, not long after her eighteenth birthday, she went out into the water and never came back. Ali drowns surfing.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Louisa, who has just realized who he is, sniffs back: Louisa recognizes the homeless man in the alley as her idol, the artist C. Jat.
Anagnorisis, untitled
So he sighs and points reluctantly at himself on the pier. Ted's admission that he is one of the three "boys" in the painting pivots Louisa's relation to him.
Pathos, untitled
When the phone rang the next night, his mother was sleeping so soundly that she didn’t answer until the second ring. That time it was the police. Christian's death by heart attack at a party.

Books that share these scenes with My Friends

About the author

Fredrik Backman