My Friends Study Guide

Fredrik Backman grew up in Helsingborg, a city in  southern Sweden. Eventually, he started working as a journalist, writing for the Helsingborg’s newspaper and for a Swedish men’s magazine. In 2012, he published his first novel, En man som heter Ove, which became a national bestseller. Backman attained a wider international profile in 2013, when the book was translated to English as A Man Called Ove. Since then, Backman’s books have continued to find a wide audience, both in his native Sweden and internationally. His work has also been adapted to film and television, with one of the most notable being a 2022 movie adaptation of his first book, retitled A Man Called Otto. Backman lives in Stockholm with his wife and two children.

My Friends is vague about both the time and place of its setting, but context clues like pop culture references and references to English being widely spoken as a second language suggest that it takes place in Backman’s native Sweden, alternating between roughly the time when he grew up and roughly the present day. One of the most important figures referenced in the book is Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was known for bringing wider attention to graffiti and street art, artforms that the traditional artistic institutions tended to ignore. Although Basquiat’s work had anti-capitalist themes, it ironically went on to become wildly valuable, with the 2017 sale of his Untitled 1982 painting being one of the most expensive art sales of all time. Other details of Basquiat’s life also seem to have inspired My Friends, including his history of addiction (including death by overdose) and his frequent use of skulls in his work.

Fredrik Backman’s status as a Swedish writer with an international following is rare but not unprecedented. Today, many people associate Sweden with crime fiction, which began in the early 2000s with the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Backman’s work doesn’t share much in common with Larsson’s, but his work does have some things in common with Swedish writer Mikael Niemi, whose novel Popular Music from Vittula was a humorous coming-of-age story that went on to have an international audience. The rebellious young female characters in Backman’s My Friends could also harken back to Pippi Longstocking, another famous figure in Swedish literature from the novels by Astrid Lindgren. Backman’s novels, while often not quite fitting into the genre of young adult, do nevertheless often take inspiration from the genre with their focus on exploring the inner lives of younger characters. Backman has claimed that fairy tales and folktales have also long been an influence on him, and there is a long tradition of these in Scandinavian countries, going back to the Old Norse sagas and Viking stories. Because of Backman’s combination of tragedy and humor, he is sometimes compared to English-language writers like John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) and Nick Hornby (About a Boy).