🍷 Flavour Profile
Primary Notes: Summer-tinted nostalgia, bittersweet realism
Secondary Notes: Darker notes of trauma, softened by the sweetness of innocence.
📜 Provenance
🍽️ Medium: Book | Pages: 448
👤 By: Fredrik Backman
📍 Where I Found It: Cousins’ Book Club
🍷 Tasting Notes
In the first chapter, Backman says, “Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.” My heart stops for a moment at the simple brilliance of that line. Considering that the plot revolves around a group of friends, a world-famous painting, and the philosophy of art, it is nothing short of genius to begin there.
There is an incredibly rare intimacy to the book’s third-person narration. This surprised me, as I have only ever really experienced that kind of closeness in books written in the first person.
As for the story, what begins with a young girl, seemingly up to no good at an art auction, soon evolves into the story of a group of friends who have navigated incredibly difficult childhoods, and of how art is like air to them. It is essential; it is survival. There is an intentional juxtaposition between one of them being a world-renowned artist who never quite fits inside his fame, and the kind of art that belongs to everyone — the kind painted on white walls, scribbled into sketchbooks, and imagined in our minds. It almost feels like a youthful rebellion against the exclusivity of traditional art circles, and a reminder that to be human is to create, to imagine, to love, and to feel.
The strongest note, for me, is the way this book reframes art and redefines to whom it belongs. Art is context, friendship, feeling, suffering, coincidence. Most of all, art needs friends, not gatekeepers.
Lastly, and perhaps most beautifully, it reminds us that art is not limited to the things we create, but includes what we leave of ourselves in other people. It has been a while since my soul tasted something as divine as that sentiment.
✨ The Finish
🕯️ What Stayed: “Art needs friends.” and “The best way to know God is to love many things.”
💬 If you asked me: I loved this for its tenderness and the witness it bears to a world where art belongs to everyone, is everywhere, and, most of all, is what we leave of ourselves in other people.
🏷️ Vintage
Published: May 2025 | Read: March 2026
📝 Footnotes:
Where to Find the Book: My Friends by Friedrik Backman
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The Big Smokey Apple 