My Friends, by Fredrik Backman

Backman is one of my fave authors. I especially loved A Man Named Ove...but My Friends is a masterpiece. Wow. The quotes. Backman is the king of satire, which makes reading about tough topics easier. 

    This book explores teenage friendships, families, dysfunction, foster kids, and art. The teen years is when we are so very vulnerable...at school, sometimes at home (abuse), out in the world, and Backman treats all these topics with finesse and satire.  Our friends from the teen years can feel like a lifeboat. That's how it is with Ted, Joar (yo-ar), Ali, and "the artist." Those friends create a world whose ripples are felt decades later by Louisa, who is a foster kid who has lost "her human" - her BFF, Fish. 

    I highly recommend listening to this on audio. The narrator is spectacular in bringing the characters to life. 

Ps. I read 2 books simultaneously -- this one (audio) and "A Boy's Life" (print copy), and I found similarities in the topics. 

This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff

This memoir, which begins in 1955, is about a boy whose parents divorced -- Toby lives with his mom -- his brother lives with his dad. Separated geographically and emotionally, Toby grows up close to his mom...until she gets married. Women were subservient and forgiving of their menfolk in the 1950s-60s in ways we cannot understand today. 

This book lets us peek into the life of a (white) kid, who spends several years in Concrete, Wash., near Seattle. There are misfits, and rabble-rousers. There's alcoholism and some brutality from Toby's stepfather (a real bastard!). There's so much detail in this book that it feels like you've stepped into the scenes as a bystander. 

Either Stephen King or Mary Karr wrote about this memoir by Tobias Wolff, and I've wanted to read it ever since. The book pubbed in 1989. I highly recommend it. It walks you thru the life of a boy with a troubled past, troubled present, and how he deals with so much --- bullying at school, violence and jealousy at home, a distant dad, the loss of his only brother (for several years).

Nine Stories, JD Salinger

The most famous of these 9 stories is "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." The story opens with Muriel talking on the phone to her mom -- Muriel is at a hotel with her husband. The mom is worried that Muriel's husband, Seymour, is unhinged. Seymour served in WW2 and clearly has issue. Muriel says, "He won't take off his bathrobe." In the next scene, a man lays on the beach, wearing a bathrobe, presumably Seymour. Nearby, a mother is slathering her 5 yo daughter , Sybil, with lotion. Then the mother tells Sybil to be good while the mom goes back to the hotel for a bit. Right there... foreboding! Who leaves a small child alone in a public area, especially near water? Sybil walks over to the man in the bathrobe), and they know each other from staying at the same hotel. The whole idea of this scene made me cringe. While nothing overtly lude happens, there are small moments that are cringe worthy. Eg, Seymour and Sybil go in the water with a floatie, looking for bananafish, and he kisses Sybil's foot. Just ew. 

Analysis: Seymour makes up the story of Bananafish that gorge themselves on bananas. And this represents the materialism of post WW2 America, which is in sharp contrast to the war years and the preceding Depression. Seymour's bathrobe symbolizes him trying to hide himself from the world. He doesn't interact with adults (laying on a beach alone, covered up), but interacts with a child. The theme here is that he seeks the innocence he had pre-war. But even as he interacts with Sybil, we hear Sybil being jealous and a bit violent (eg, she's jealous of another little girl in the hotel that played piano with Seymour, and she tells him, "next time" that girl sits next to you on the piano bench, "knock her off"). Thus, Seymour comes to the realization that ... there's no such thing as pure innocence...that humankind will always find reasons for jealousy and acts of violence. Also, he probably realizes that his kissing of Sybil's foot was, itself, a corruption of innocence. 

SPOILER--

The end scene is his suicide. He realizes there's no escaping the corrupt world that he sees. 

NOTE-- It's interesting that Salinger himself hid away from the world, like Seymour and his bathrobe.  Salinger was part of D Day, so he too was an ex soldier like Seymour -- disillusioned like Seymour.  Salinger sought help for what we'd now call PTSD. He died in 2010 at his NH home where he'd hidden from the fame that came to him after Catcher in the Rye. I can identify with a writer wanting to preserve their privacy. It's too grandiose to compare any ole writer to Salinger. Yet, I get it.