A Night (or Two) with Fredrik Backman

 As I have mentioned, Fredrik Backman is currently touring a few cities in the United States and Canada promoting his conclusion to the Bear Town trilogy, The Winners.  I was fortunate to attend his debut night at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center.  It was truly wonderful.  He is such a gracious and open person who shares quite a bit of himself in both his art and in person.  It is very interesting listening to him because you can feel his feels and how deeply his emotion goes and the connections between himself and his books.

I was over the moon happy when the interviewer asked the question that I submitted online.  I had asked if writing releases some of his anxiety.  He has a fabulous sense of humor and can be a bit self-deprecating at times.  He poked fun at himself in his answer stating that "We don't know.  The jury is still out. My therapist, my wife and my agent are still discussing whether it is self-medicating or not."  Then he  did explain how much goes into writing a book.  How he puts a bit of someone he knows (or a bit of several people) into each character to make them matter to him and then the magic begins.  

He did not only discuss The Winners, but, when on to share so much with his audience about what is important to him, how his writing is different than many authors and how there is a story inside of him dying to come out.  With the Beartown trilogy, he knew at the onset the premise of the book and how he wanted the trilogy to end.  Everything in the middle was a find as you go or a there it is moment for him.  He is a person who enjoys to watch and observe people, stating that he often steals some of his work from those situations and adds them into his stories.  

I enjoyed it so much that I also attended his Dallas engagement which was also available virtually.  This one seemed a bit deeper for him as he shared a bit of his personal history (about his family, his mother being a bit of Britt-Marie, and the pain that has stayed with him when he lost a dear friend to suicide at twenty years old).  He elaborated how all of this is a culmination of things in his stories.  There are always people suffering from anxiety and suicide has been in several of his books as well.  He wants to rewrite the stories that he was not able to fix and give them happy endings.  He also proposed that as we use our imagination to contemplate a story, we enter into the stories as a collective. That is why we can feel his feelings so deeply since they touched him first.  

The only part I did not enjoy was that you could see that this stretched him quite a bit and was out of his comfort zone.  It is nice for us, the readers, to be able to take a peek inside of his mind, but, I hope it wasn't too stressful for him.  Of course, seeing that all of this was a new adventure for him, it could also make for some interesting parts of new books ;)