Literary Fiction · Free kit
My Friends
Most people look at the world's most famous seascape and see water. Eighteen-year-old Louisa looks closer and finds three tiny figures at the end of a pier — then spends a train ride learning how those friends, twenty-five years earlier, turned one brutal harbor-town summer into a painting that outlived them. Backman's novel is about found family, art that refuses to stay a landscape, and the people who call you one of us before you believe it.
“If you've had people who can make you laugh like that, you never forget it. If not, words are pointless.”
Complete free book club kit
BookClubee may earn a commission from Bookshop.org purchases, which supports independent bookshops.
Plan your meeting
Spoiler warning — best after finishing the book
My Friends Discussion Questions
20 free questions written for My Friends. No obvious right answers — built to spark real disagreement.
1. Auction guests treat The One of the Sea as a landscape and an investment. Louisa sees three tiny figures at the end of a pier. After finishing the book, which way of looking feels more honest — and which way do you catch yourself using on people?
Warm Up
2. Louisa sneaks into the auction with spray paint and is chased out as if she came to deface the painting. Was she a vandal, a pilgrim, or something the room had no category for?
Warm Up
3. After a few minutes of graffiti in an alley, the dying artist tells Louisa she is "one of us." What does that recognition actually confer — belonging, a burden, or a job she didn't apply for?
Warm Up
4. Ted does not want a traveling companion. Louisa hounds him onto the train with the ashes. Is she invading his grief, or is she the only person still treating him like someone with a future?
Warm Up
5. Joar tells Kimkim to just paint the sea because it is one color, so it should be easy. Is that the worst art advice in the novel, or the most loving sentence anyone says to him?
Warm Up
6. Louisa could sell The One of the Sea and change her life overnight. Keeping it means staying broke beside the one beautiful thing that ever saw her. Which choice would you defend — and what does your answer say about what you think art is for?
Debate Starter
7. Joar sells the bicycle his mother bought him so Kimkim can buy paint and canvas. Is that the purest friendship in the book, or another way Joar takes over someone else's life and calls it rescue?
Debate Starter
8. Joar plans to kill his abusive father and hides a knife to do it. Do you read that as a child's last attempt at protecting his mother — or as a line he had already decided to cross, accident or no accident?
Debate Starter
9. Years later, Joar goes to prison for assaulting a man he saw abusing his wife. Is that the same instinct that made him a ringleader and a shield — and should we admire it, fear it, or both?
Debate Starter
10. The harbor town knew about Joar's father and stayed quiet. How much of the novel's violence belongs to the people who decided not to interfere?
Debate Starter
11. Optimists might say the pier saved four children who would otherwise have been destroyed. Pessimists might say the pier was a beautiful story they told while the world still broke them — Ali still drowns, Christian's heart still gives out, Kimkim still dies young. Which reading fits the book you finished?
Debate Starter
12. Optimists might call gifting Louisa the painting a miracle of found family. Pessimists might call it a dying man handing a homeless teenager a fortune, a target, and everyone else's grief. Which side has the stronger case?
Debate Starter
13. Ted leaves teaching after a student stabs him. Is that self-preservation he owed himself, or another adult disappearing from the kids who needed someone unlike the Owl?
Debate Starter
14. Christian, the janitor, paints a mural on a wall that is supposed to stay white and teaches Kimkim to paint as himself. Is he the book's best mentor — or someone whose broken rules later help pull a child toward the same addictions that wrecked him?
Debate Starter
15. Louisa writes "See you soon. —Mom" on the back of a postcard of The One of the Sea, inventing the message she needed. What does the novel suggest about the stories we are allowed to tell ourselves in order to survive — and when those stories start to cost other people?
Deep Dive
16. Foster homes that fail Louisa, an auction house that prices a child's summer, a town that looks away from a beating: which of those systems felt most like something still running in the world outside this book?
Deep Dive
17. The artist signs the painting C. Jat — Christian, Joar, Ali, Ted — and hides skulls where most buyers will never look. What does it mean that the most famous person in the story refuses to put his own name on the work that made him?
Deep Dive
18. Joar enters Kimkim in a youth competition so the winning painting will hang in a museum, then they learn Kimkim is too old for the contest. How should we sit with a "failure" that still becomes the most valuable painting in the room?
Deep Dive
19. Years later Louisa uses her fame to pull younger artists forward, and she tells Ted he should write a book. Is the novel arguing that surviving is incomplete until you become someone else's pier?
Deep Dive
20. Backman never fully resolves whether friendship can actually save you from a violent home. If the pier did not prevent the worst things, what, exactly, did it save — and is that enough?
Deep Dive