My Friends by Fredrik Backman
Published 2025 · 436 pages · 118,000 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 39 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.