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.”
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My Friends Icebreakers
Answer in under 30 seconds. These connect to the book’s themes without spoiling the story.
Personality Reveal
1. Are you the person who notices the tiny detail in the corner, or the person who takes in the whole picture first?
Personality Reveal
2. When a group is forming, do you claim a seat immediately or wait to be waved over?
Personality Reveal
3. Are you more likely to keep a scrap of paper for a decade or throw things away the day you get them?
Funny & Light
4. What's the most unhinged thing you have ever done just to see a painting, a concert, a view, or a person?
Funny & Light
5. What's a "we laughed so hard we almost fell off something" memory you still cannot explain to a serious adult?
Funny & Light
6. What talent do you swear you don't have that your friends refuse to stop believing in?
Would You Rather
7. Would you rather be famous for something almost nobody understands, or unknown for something that quietly saved one person?
Would You Rather
8. Would you rather have one summer that defined the rest of your life, or a long life with no single legendary season?
Would You Rather
9. Would you rather always be the friend who sells the bike so someone else can try — or the friend who has to accept that gift?
Hot Take
10. Hot take: the family you choose can matter more than the family you were born into. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
11. Hot take: if a painting is worth a fortune, the fortune is the least interesting thing about it. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
12. Hot take: adults who "don't want to get involved" are usually just protecting their own comfort. Agree or disagree?
Personal Connection
13. Who was the first person who made you feel like you belonged in a room?
Personal Connection
14. What's one object you have kept because it proves someone once saw you — a postcard, a ticket, a drawing, a note?
Personal Connection
15. When did you last sit somewhere ordinary (a dock, a stoop, a parking lot) that felt like the edge of the world in a good way?