Transcript for The Girlfriend Author Interview of Fredrik Backman in September 2025 for his book My Friends
Shelley Emling: Welcome, everyone, to tonight’s The Girlfriend Book Club monthly discussion. I'm Shelly Emling, the executive editor of the Girlfriend Newsletter. I'm also the moderator of this girlfriend book club, and this month, 112,000 of you or so chose My Friends as our September pick, and I'm so glad you did. As always, you picked a fantastic read.
I think I devoured this book in about three days. And I know it's a favorite of many of y'all, our members of the book club. So we're so thrilled that we have bestselling author Fredrik Backman with us tonight to talk about My Friends. So welcome Fredrik . Thank you. Hi. Hi. Thanks for joining us. I just have to ask you this book as I said, it was so good, so different from your other books, anxious anxious people, and Beartown, some of your other books.
Is there I just wondered, it's so based on friendship being a teenager. Art the sense of belonging, finding your family among your friends. Did you have a group like this when you were 14? Did you have a group of friends that you've kept in touch with all these years or anything similar to that?
Fredrik Backman: Yeah, it's not based on, first of all, I don't know if it's that different from my other books because I don't know what people. I don't know what people put into that when they say that, when they categorize you like that, I don't know what people put in. I don't know why people like things at all.
But no, but it's not based on. It's not based on real people. I've never written anything based on a real person, but it's based on, I haven't Okay. But it is based on a lot of people. So it is based on a lot of people that I grew up with. The, you take bits and pieces here and there, it's like oranges takes a lot of oranges to make one glass of juice.
It takes a lot of, I think it makes, takes 20 real people to make one character.
Shelley Emling: But did you have strong friendships when you were a teenager like that?
Fredrik Backman: Yeah. Yeah, I did. And I think most people do, most people have friendships when they're teenagers that are defines you when, because the people that you find, because you are.
You are at that age when everyone is lost, everyone is looking for something. And I think the people that you connect to when you are on that journey they, that, that friendship is gonna be that friendship is gonna be stronger for sure.
Shelley Emling: So before I get I did ask the book club members to send me questions to ask you, but I wanted to ask one of my own to start out with.
I do always ask, was there a particular chapter or scene or character that was more challenging to write in this book, My Friends than the others? Was there something that was a little bit more challenging for you?
Fredrik Backman: No, but it was all c cha. It's all challenging all the time. I wish I could say that there was only one scene or one thing that was, but it's all always the way I write everything is connected to something.
If there is something at some point that I could take out, then it doesn't belong there to begin with because every, everything is connected. Everything sits together with something else. So as soon as you get through one passage of the book and you feel good about yourself and then. You find a problem in the next passage of the book, and then you have to go back and you have to fix that in 30 places in the first passage.
So it was I think the challenging thing this time around was that I I usually start with, I think I more often than not start with the humor. I start off more often with the comedic parts of a story. And then I add the drama. And this time around I did the other, did it the other way around.
Oh. So the whole in the first draft the whole now story of Ted and Luisa wasn't even there in the first draft. So in the first draft, it was only the backstory. And so the whole now story is added on. When I started working on the second draft of the books, I think that was probably the most challenging thing that you all of a sudden you, you find out that maybe this, maybe the story that I had intended, it doesn't work or it isn't enough or it's.
Fredrik Backman: In this case it was too dark. For the people who read it, they I was gonna,
Shelley Emling: yeah, I saw,
Fredrik Backman: You get, you, you give it to some, you, you write something and you're pretty excited about it, and you feel good about it. And I've been doing this for 15 years, so one, one would assume that I know. What I'm doing at this point.
Yes. And I felt good about myself and I started showing the draft, first draft to people and no one liked it.
Shelley Emling: That's what I read. I saw you interviewed about that. I think it, did it take you two years to write the first draft or is that not
Fredrik Backman: No. It didn't take me two years. I don't know exactly how long it take took, but it's, but it's, it's always also, it's impossible when people always ask like, how long did the book take?
Shelley Emling: It's,
Fredrik Backman: Do you have, you can count the hours if you want, but that the writing time is not the thing. The thinking time is the thing, right? It takes a lot, take, it takes a lot longer to think of a book than to write it.
But no, I showed the first draft to people and no one, absolutely no one liked it. And these are people who make money from me making books, and they still didn't, they still didn't wanna publish it. So I had to go back and redo the whole thing. And I did. And then, and so that was, I think the process between the first and second draft was, that was the most challenging part to to figure out an entirely new way to write a story that you thought that you. I knew what it was.
Shelley Emling: So did people think it was too dark? Is that right? Or They
Fredrik Backman: thought it was way too dark. Yeah, way too dark. Yeah. To sum it up, they thought it was way too dark.
Yeah.
Shelley Emling: So how, you said the thinking part is a big part of this obviously, for any writer. So where did the imp, what was the impetus behind this whole idea to write this book about these teenagers and show them then, and then show them now? Where did that come from?
Fredrik Backman: I don't know. I don't know where anything comes from.
I have, first of all it's everyone thought the first draft was too dark and they were right. But I was in a dark place and I didn't I needed to write the darkness first. I needed to get the darkness out
Fredrik Backman: and then look at it, and then add. Something on top of that made the darkness more bearable and more and make it more into a, it needed to be more of a story.
There needed to be more of a forward going motion. And and there needed to be redemption hope. But I think the. The idea was basically that I wanted to write something that was I wanted to write something for, basically I want a lot of the, a lot of the book comes from between the first and second draft.
Had a bit of a breakdown, had a bit of a life crisis and felt that maybe I should stop writing. Not because I don't writing, but I don't enjoy book publishing very much.
I don't enjoy that part of it at all. I felt maybe I would be a more functional human being and a better, better family member.
And if I if I didn't do this weird thing for a living and between the first and second draft. What happened was that I, I figured that if this would be the last book that I publish
Fredrik Backman: Which I, where very much felt at the time that it could be then who would I want it to be for?
And I wrote the dedication page, which is to anyone who's young and wants to create something. Do it. Because that what I, that's what I figured. If this is my last book, then I would want it to be for someone who's young and wants to do the thing that I've been doing for 15 years.
And I wanted it to be about that. And I want it to be about. The book is about art, but to me it's about creativity. It's about that being, being in a space where you feel like, I want to do something, I wanna, anything I wanna create something. And that, that was the thing that I was looking for.
And and then, every book process is the same. You get lost a little bit. And then, there's a lot of chaos. And then eventually there's a book and you never know how that happened really. And then they ask you, can you do it again? And I say, I have no idea. We'll see.
Shelley Emling: So one of the book club members did say that they saw you speak somewhere in May, and that you did indicate that this might be your last book a couple months ago.
Is that still what you're thinking or who knows why? I
Fredrik Backman: don't know. I honestly, I don't know. I've given myself the permission to not know. I don't know. The, I'm well aware of the fact that I'm extremely privileged to get to do this. And I understand that it's it's, but it's also the fact that like in the book, that there's a line in the book where this.
This very successful artist says that he feels like fame and success to him was like he accidentally took the wrong coat in a cloakroom, right? And now he's wearing, and now he's wearing someone else's dream.
Fredrik Backman: That is very much how I have felt. It wasn't my, it was never my intention or my goal to, to write books so that I could.
Talk about them on stage or do interviews about them, right? That was never the goal that, that the, I, you get into the industry of something and you realize that the actual work is a very small part of what you do.
Fredrik Backman: The writing part is a very small part of what you are expected to do, and.
I don't feel that I'm very good at the other parts. I don't feel that I enjoy them a lot. I don't like traveling.
Fredrik Backman: I, I do very badly at hotels. I don't like flying. I have What you don't like? I have my, I have what my daughter refers to as many issues. So it's just that, I don't know.
It's not gonna be the last book that I write. It's just that I don't know how I'm gonna go about book publishing.
Fredrik Backman: It's I haven't figured that out yet. I'm, but we'll see. It's but I did feel at the time when I was writing this, I felt that this is gonna be the last one because I don't think I have it in me to reload another time.
But now we'll see.
Shelley Emling: So your writing style is so enticing. I actually made some notes when I was reading the book at one point. You say the artist is like a paper boat headed for a waterfall. In another part you said Ted's yelling was about as effective as throwing marshmallows at a whale and thinking it will change direction.
It, your writing is unique and just good. Have you always been this just a really great writer for, since you were young?
Fredrik Backman: I think, no because I'm not that I'm gonna say something now, is gonna see it is gonna sound humble and it's really not because everyone who knows me will tell you that I, my ego is as big as anyone else's, but I'm not like, I'm not good at writing. That's not my. Talent. I'm good at storytelling,
Fredrik Backman: I'm good at telling a story. If I was only good at writing, then it wouldn't work in translation because I still write in Swedish and then we translated to English, and then I made all the, for this book, I made all the edits in English with my, my, my editor Peter Borland at Adrian in the us. Then I backwards engineer everything back to the Swedish version, which is an incredibly stupid way to work.
But it's the only way I can work because I'm not but it's, it wouldn't work in translation if this was only the language. If you have too complicated of a language, then if you writing is too complicated, it's incredibly hard to translate.
Fredrik Backman: But. The reason why it does work in translation is because I tell stories.
My, my single focus is that I want it. I don't ever want it to feel like I'm reading it from a stage. I don't even ever want to feel like I don't ever want you, I don't ever want you to admire the language. Honestly. I want to have done the work and worked hard enough at every sentence, at every word, at every wording.
Always trying to choose the simplest way forward. Always trying to choose the, because I don't want complicated words. I don't want to exclude the reader. I want the reader to feel included. And then I want it to feel like for you, like we're sitting in an airport and our flight is delayed. I'm saying, do you wanna hear a story?
And you go yeah, alright. And I tell you a story and it's just for you. It's not for a million people, it's just a story, stupid story that I tell me I'm telling you. And I try to tell it like, I would tell you a story like I, and that's where the, throwing a marshmallow at a whale comes from.
Because that's the way that I would tell a story to a friend. That's the way that I would tell a story to my kid. That's, you describe something and you try to describe it the funniest way possible. You try to if I tell my kids a story, I try to make them laugh. Yeah.
If I tell my wife a story I want her to I, I, I want to keep her from rolling her eyes and taking up her phone and start checking her email.
I want to keep her engaged in the story like I want. I have this thing that I want to tell you. I don't want her to feel like that. I want her to be like, all right, I want, I wanna know where this go. So that's where it comes from. It's that way of writing, I think it's just. Because I'm trying to make this story as entertaining as I can, and I try, I'm trying to get, make you, give you all the pictures in your head.
So that's where it comes from. I can't do that. Like some writers are exceptional in a way that they can, they can write 600 pages without a single joke and without a single. Without once trying really hard to keep you engaged because they're so good that you're just gonna stay anyway.
They have, they're great writers. They're, they have the great language, they're the geniuses. We have a handful in each generation. I'm not one of them. I'm a storyteller. I tell stories and I, when I tell stories, I give 100% because that's what I feel like you did. That's the only way that I'm gonna keep you engaged.
So it's so it's that also that I grew up with, I grew up with English. Literature. I grew up with Douglas Adams and Hitch Guy hitchhike his guide to the galaxy and stuff like that. So I think a lot of the jokes, a lot of the throwing away, throwing a marshmallow at a whale. Yeah.
That's very much for me growing up with Douglas Adams, that kind of humor, that kind of, always finding the. Always finding, trying to find a funny, trying to find the stupid angle. Trying to find, someone said that, someone said to me at some point that good humor is, it's stupid, but smart.
Shelley Emling: Yes.
Fredrik Backman: And that's that's always the goal.
Shelley Emling: So obviously you've always liked telling stories, but you mentioned that you don't like the traveling, the interviews, the press, all that stuff. Was that what you felt at the very beginning when you started out and with your books or is that something as you became more famous and popular that.
It's driving you more crazy now than it did. No. I've
Fredrik Backman: always, I've always been like this, always. It's yeah. I've always been like this. It's I've always been this annoying. It didn't change. Like I, my, my best friend said my, I have one of my best friends came on tour with me because usually my wife Travis with me when she couldn't come because the kids were still in school.
Yeah. When I was in the US in May one of my best friends flew over and he traveled with me, and we've known each other for 30 plus years, right? And
Fredrik Backman: so someone said something and I think I didn't really, I didn't register what they said because I was in my own head. He turned around and he said, he seems arrogant, but I can tell you that fame didn't change him.
He's always been this much of a jerk. He was always this much of a jerk. He's always been this arrogant. He was, he did Fame didn't change him at all. We would hope that it changed him for the better, but it didn't. It's no. I live in my own. I live in my head a lot. I, there's a lot of this going on in my house.
Dad focus here, car. Now there's a lot of that. I live in my head. I don't, I've never enjoyed reality very much. And I like to travel with my wife and kids.
Fredrik Backman: I do fairly well when I travel with them, but traveling alone, traveling that I just don't I don't do well.
I don't do well with in new environments. I don't do well with shifting environments all the time. I have, it takes me a long time to process something. And to kinda land in a situation. It's just that many issues like my daughter would tell you.
Shelley Emling: So I'm guessing you don't like to do book signings where people are lined up down the street and you're having but it's,
Fredrik Backman: it's, the book signings are fantastic because you get to meet people who actually like what you do for a living and respond to it.
And it's often very nice. And, it means the world to me that people read my books and it means, it's still weird that people on the other side of the world would,
Fredrik Backman: Would respond to something that I've done, but it's not it will never feel like a normal thing to me.
It will always, it's always as overwhelming as it was the first time.
Fredrik Backman: And it would be like. It's a fantastic situation. And, but maybe, once in a while I feel like this would be fantastic if there were 20 people, because then I would have time to talk to each and every one.
But but I think the signings I learned to be. I've learned to be okay with them, I think. But it's still, I don't know how to explain the kind of anxiety thing at work here but it's, I'm the kind of person who takes, I have an important phone call to make. That's three days of anxiety, like working up to the phone call, I need to go to the post office.
That's two days of I gotta go to the post office. It's a lot of working up to do like things in real life.
Fredrik Backman: it's just I hate meetings. I the whole.
Shelley Emling: Sitting in a boardroom around a big table, and
Fredrik Backman: I get like a, if me and my wife, if we're at a restaurant and my wife goes all the people at the next table, they're at a date, then I almost, I like, I get such a second like secondary panic attack on behalf of them. Or how much stress that must be that you are. You met each other online, and now you have to see each other in, in real. I, I get so much, I get so stressed out by that, that I don't know how people do it. I have the, I've had the same friends for 30 years. I've been married for 16.
I don't bring new people in. It's I have seven people in total.
Shelley Emling: You've got your people. Yeah. You don't need, yeah, I
Fredrik Backman: have, I have seven people in total. And that's,
Shelley Emling: let me ask you a fun question from one of our book club members. She asks, will you ever write a book about the adventures of donkey, your mischievous German Shepherd that you post the most hilarious things about on Instagram?
Fredrik Backman: I don't know. People keep asking me like, why don't you write a book about her? I'm like, I have written so much about this dog on Instagram. I, this is the number one. Content I have on Instagram. I write about her all of the time. I feel like when you go to a relative's house and the first thing they do is they point out that, oh, you never visit.
I'm like I'm here now. Can't be more here than here.
Fredrik Backman: Every time I write about her something, someone says, you should write a book about it, but I'm writing about her right now. I'm writing this is it.
Fredrik Backman: it's, I can't write about her more than I'm writing right now.
I'm, we're right here. We're in the moment. I don't think it's gonna be a book. I think it's it's she is good. She's good Instagram content. She's on the floor right now sleeping. She is she is the best dog and the absolute worst dog.
Shelley Emling: Oh, okay. How does that work? But alright somebody else wants to know any chance you will revisit the characters in your Beartown book books?
I find myself wondering how those characters are doing all the time.
Fredrik Backman: Now I gotten that question a lot. I think the only way that I'm, the only thing. The only way that I could see to make that interesting would be to to write about Alicia. That that we leave at the end of the third book.
We leave Alicia and she's seven, eight years old. And maybe come back when she's grown up. So that would be 10, 15 years from the last book. So the only way to do that, in a way that's interesting is to wait like 10 years. But but I don't know. I'm not gonna say I'm never gonna do it because I might have an idea.
Yeah. I wasn't planning on writing. Like I wrote two books in that series and then I felt I didn't have any ideas for a third one. So for the longest time, I felt that I wasn't gonna write a third one because I never said that it was gonna be a trilogy. I never said, so I felt maybe I won't write a third one, and then all of a sudden I had an idea that I could, okay, I could write it from this perspective.
I could do, it could be about this, and then it grew from there. But I don't know I right now, no. But in the future, maybe,
Shelley Emling: I don't know. So I just have about three more questions really quick. One is from another book club member, how are you so able to get into the mindsets of teens and young adults teens are at the mercy of their parents and other adults?
Like how do you zone in on these the mindsets of teams as well as you do?
Fredrik Backman: First of all, I accept the fact that I can't. Second of all, it's like anything I make the basic assumption that they're humans too,
Fredrik Backman: That they have the same, that they're basically the same as I am. They. They have dreams and hopes and fears and they fall in love and they fall out of love and they wanna be loved and they search for themselves and they search for this.
They search for who they are in the eyes of others and all of that. And I think the way in this story, I wrote it and this story, the challenge was that I had a group of teenagers who grew up 25 years ago.
I knew them because. I grew up with kids like them, so I knew them. But then there was this 18-year-old now in, in present time, Louisa.
And I didn't quite have her, I struggled a lot with her.
Fredrik Backman: To find her because it's, what I look for is a rhythm, like people have a rhythm.
People have a rhythm in their way of speaking, in their way of making jokes and, in their, and I was looking for a rhythm for her. And if you read the book you find pretty fast that Yeah.
She has a very distinct rhythm. She's really like everything. She's 300 kilometers an hour into everything. Yeah. She's really? Which worked really well because I felt this is gonna be, she has to have that energy to bounce off Ted, who is the opposite. Who is this highly neurotic man in his forties?
Not based on anyone in particular there are certain things that, of his neurotic behavior and hate to travel and all of that comes from me. But I but I was looking for like, how am I gonna write her? Because I don't know what it's like to be a teenager now. I don't, I have no idea.
But I felt that. I felt that she was, she would behave a little younger than 18.
Because she struggles, because she's fighting for the right to be a kid. She's trying to, fight to have a childhood. And and I happen to have a 12-year-old daughter.
She and her friends, 12 year olds.
Now they're a little older than 12 year olds. So I felt maybe, maybe this, maybe I could find something in between the way they speak and the way that Louisa would speak. Maybe I could find something, in between. And and I have the exact moment where I felt that.
All right. I think I know how this particular teenager will talk. I think I have that now because my daughter, 12 years old. I happen to see online on TikTok or whatever it is that you see things that they were talking about skinny jeans. Yeah. It was a whole thing. And I when I grew up, skinny jeans were, they were skinny jeans.
They were jeans that you had to you could wear them once and then you would cut your way out of them, right? And then I saw a picture of something and someone said, some teenagers said, oh, these are skinny jeans. And I'm like, those are just pants. Those are normal pants. Those are not skinny jeans.
What, what is going on? And I made the terrible mistake of asking my daughter about it. And I I said I pointed to my own pants and I said, are these skinny jeans? And my daughter look the way she does, she gives her mother a look and points at me like, why is it speaking and.
And my wife, God bless her, leaned in and said she was trying to help. So my wife leaned in and said, I think Dad just wants to know if when you go out with him, are you embarrassed by the way he dresses? And I was like, that's not at all what I asked. I wasn't even close to what I had. I just wanted to know about what is like the Category for skinny jeans. I just wanna know, these are things that I'm interested in.
Fredrik Backman: it. Yeah. And my daughter, she turned around to my wife and she said I'm embarrassed about other things. If he like, wants a list and. I was, pretty, you're pretty mortified, you're pretty broken down.
You, you walk away there with your self-esteem.
Fredrik Backman: At the bottom of a dark hole. And I felt that's her, that's the way she speaks. That's the way she, that's the way she views the world. That that kinda, and I figured out through that, and that would be the answer to the question that.
I think the hard thing about trying to write s is you try, you as a writer you fall into this trap of trying to imagining the way that teenagers speak to each other.
Fredrik Backman: Which is impossible. And the only thing that's gonna happen is if you, if you try to imitate that, you're gonna sound, you're gonna sound 900 years old as my daughter would put it.
Fredrik Backman: But that's rarely what I needed to write because I needed to write this 18-year-old. But for most of the book, she is interacting with this 40-year-old man. So I don't have to know how she speaks to other 18 year olds. I need to know how she speaks to an erotic man in his forties. And that I had, so I was like this is I have this now, so now I'm just waiting for my daughter to figure this out so that she will start claiming royalties or something.
But that was the, that, that was the way that I did it. I'm not try, I don't even try to write. Oh, I'm gonna write a teenager now because it doesn't work, right? You have to assume that they're people and then you have to find something very specific about the way that they speak and then try to find a rhythm.
And. So that's how I like leaned into it.
Shelley Emling: I saw you interviewed I looked at some interviews with you last night and somebody asked you about how you bond with your kids and you were talking about how you watch sitcoms with them sometimes, or different TV shows. So just selfishly, I just wondered if there's anything you could share that you guys have all watched together that everybody really loved that maybe.
We would know about here in the States?
Fredrik Backman: Oh we watched, like sitcom wise, we watched as a family, like my kids are 12 and 15. They've watched we watched big Bang Theory together, right? We, they're watching friends now with my wife and I jump in and out when I can. But we watch Seinfeld.
We watched I, all of the sitcoms that my wife and I grew up with,
Shelley Emling: yeah.
Fredrik Backman: A lot of them still works. How Met Your mother still works, right? So we do a lot of that. We watched a lot of we've watched a lot of superhero movies. I think my wife has watched. Every Marvel movies movie chronologically with my kids, we go to the movies a lot, like a lot, and that's how we, that's usually what I said.
This is how we, this is how we get to know each other because my wife and I are insanely different people. She actually likes the world and reality and likes people and likes having fun.
Fredrik Backman: And I'm me. But this is how we get to know each other. We we watch things and we go to the cinema and we experience culture.
We go to museums and we, we take in experiences and then we argue about the experience a lot. Like a lot,
Fredrik Backman: We argue about movies all of the time. But that's how we get to know each other, and that's how we got to know our kids. That's how we still get to know our kids. It's by going through the cinema, watching movies, watching TV shows.
Fredrik Backman: We were in London this summer and we watched Hamilton, the musical. Yes.
And, which is such a fantastic thing to do, which, because I think when I grew up, I thought I didn't I don't think that if I would've been asked, would've been able to bet on the fact that, oh, in, in, when you, one day when you have kids, 20 years from now, musical theater is gonna be a really cool thing for them.
Yeah. Like you will have 12, 13, 14 year olds. They're gonna be obsessed with musical theater. Yeah. You didn't see that. You thought now it's all gonna be virtual reality and it's all this, and it was fantastic to go there. They were blown away. And we were talking about it for days. We, we drove to Spain this summer and one of the kids.
Listen to the Hamilton soundtrack the entire way. And to me it's the same thing with the kids now on the amount of young people who are filling TikTok with book recommendations and talking about books and the amount of teenagers that are on good reads, talking about books.
It's, it's a phenomenal thing that I think we should be eternally grateful for because it's because all we do as a, our generation is all we do is all the kids, they are just, they just want to be on their iPads. They just want to be on their computers. They never, I'm like, they love Hamilton.
There were a lot of teenagers in that audience, like a lot, and they were insanely. Engaged in this. Like they knew way more than, whoever adult that they had to bring with them because they needed a ride. It's like they, they're, and they're into musical theater, which I would say is the absolute opposite to staring at your I founder.
Fredrik Backman: Staring at your iPhone. It has to be the exact opposite to that. And they don't read books on. Both of my kids read a lot of books. Their friends read a lot of books. They never read their books on a screen. They always go, they always want the physical copy.
Fredrik Backman: They don't have Kindle.
They, they want the physical copy. So I think it's, and it's been, that kind thing is I think a huge part of me. Still finding things to write about. Is there, there's a lot of that come from, comes from, hanging out with my kids and seeing, seeing them getting excited about things.
Yeah. Which is my favorite thing to see my wife and kids when they get excited about something. That's very much what the book is about. That's how I find my way in, into. Talking about art in the book, which is one of these things that people keep asking me about. I don't know anything about art.
I didn't grow up connected to art. It's not my thing. I never understood it. I never went to Mus. I had no one to bring me to museums. I was never introduced to it in, in, in that way. But my wife loves art. And when I was trying to find my way into the perspective of how can I talk about art in the book.
Without coming off as a fraud because I don't know enough about art. I'm interested in it now. I love it now, but I don't know enough about it to write a book about it.
Fredrik Backman: And if you read the book now, you'll see that I didn't do that. I wrote, I didn't write it from the perspective of the person who write, who painted the painting.
I didn't write it from the perspective of the person who looks at the painting and understands the painting. Yeah. I wrote it from the perspective of someone looking at the painting.
And that's me looking at my wife. That's me looking at my kids. I'm looking at them while they're having a cultural experience.
That's how the whole, the entire book is written like that.
Shelley Emling: Yeah. I can, I get that. I have three 20 somethings and I love seeing them excited about things just like you. It's,
Fredrik Backman: it's it's the absolute best.
Fredrik Backman: When they, when they fall in love with something, when they get obsessed with something, that's my favorite thing.
Fredrik Backman: They get a little too interested in something. That's my favorite thing.
Shelley Emling: Thank you so much for joining us. Again, the book is My Friends. I think everybody watching has read this, but we're so honored and thrilled that you joined us tonight. Those folks in the book club, please stay online because I'm going to be posting some conversation starters so that you can talk amongst yourselves about the book.
And just reminder that next month in October, our book is The River Is Waiting by Wally Land. I just
Fredrik Backman: read that, I read that this summer.
Shelley Emling: Did you read it this summer? Yeah, I read it this summer. I just finished it too. Yeah. He'll be joining us third Tuesday of October. It's a great book.
Fredrik Backman: It's a terrific book. Yeah, it's really it's quite something.
Shelley Emling: Yeah. It's good. So both, so My Friends, I almost, almost gave a spoiler. Just don't say anything. Yeah. Myself.
Shelley Emling: Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody, and have a great evening and I'll see you next month. Thanks.
Fredrik Backman: Thanks so much for having me.
