Fredrik Backman Dedicates “The Winners” to Those Who Love Something Too Much

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly

Tricia Ford: Hello everyone, this is Audible Editor Tricia Ford and with me is Fredrik Backman, bestselling author of listener favorites like A Man Called Ove and Anxious People. And we're here today to talk about The Winners, the third and final book in the beloved Beartown trilogy. Welcome, Fredrik. Thank you so much for being here today.

Fredrik Backman: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

TF: The Winners is a long-awaited conclusion to the Beartown series, which inspired an HBO series of the same name and follows a small hockey town's residents as they grapple with change, pain, hope, and redemption. It's been about four years for us here in the US since Us Against You came out, Book 2 in the series. But I have to say, from the moment I pressed play and listened to the dedication of The Winners, I knew I was back in Beartown. It immediately reminded me why I've loved the residents of Beartown so much, and it's a simply beautiful dedication. So, I'd like to play that right now.

Narrator Marin Ireland: "To you who talk too much and sing too loud and cry too often and love something in life more than you should."

TF: Can you tell us what this phrase means to you?

FB: I think the core of Beartown, the core of those books, was that I'm interested in people who are obsessed with things. I have very little in common with people who like things on a reasonable level, who [have] nothing that they are obsessed with. Nothing that makes them lose touch with reality. Nothing that ever makes them go too far with something or being too emotional or people who are in balance all of the time. I envy them. I wish I was more like that a lot of the time, but I think I'm only interested in people who are too interested in something. And I think all of Beartown is that. All of Beartown comes from that core of people who just love something more than they should.

TF: Talking about something you love too much in life, for Beartown that obvious thing is hockey. I was first drawn to this book because it's a hockey book that you don't have to be a hockey fan to enjoy. I was like, "Okay, I'll give it a try." But hockey really is a big deal in this series. And as far as loving something more than you should, how does hockey play into it? What is the good that hockey brings to Beartown and what is the bad?

FB: First of all, sports, all sports, are, to me, an escape from reality. I found sports and literature at the same time, when I was five or six years old. That's when I figured out that, "Oh, this is a vehicle to help you escape reality." And I didn't like reality very much. I still don't. I'm always on the hunt for something that helps me escape. I want to go into another world or go someplace else or experience something that I haven't known before, didn't know that I was craving, didn't know that I was longing for. I always do that. And sports and literature is the same thing for me.

I also think sports, for a lot of people, me included, they're a happy place. They're this little bubble that you can go to once a week and disappear into, and for a couple of hours you don't think about problems at work or problems in your marriage or problems with your kids or problems with your friends, the people you've lost, the grief and the anxiety and all of the everyday things that people go through. And once a week you go to a game and all of that disappears because the only thing that matters at that point is the thing that goes on, on the ice down there. You can escape from things for a little bit.

"Decent people are capable of really bad things if they think that they're protecting something that they love. That's the whole basis of the story."

And I think that's why people are so defensive about it. I think that's why people are so sensitive about it, and so aggressive. When someone tries to impose change on sports in any way, you have people being really aggressive. If you come in here with your politics and your agendas and your opinions and you try to impose reality on my bubble of imagination, I'm going to be defensive.

I think that's the best and the worst part of sports. And I think that in Beartown, this is a force of good in the way that this is what holds their community together. The bear is a symbol to them. The green shirt is a symbol to them. “This is us. This is who we are.” In small ways, it helps them remember all the time that we have to stick together. We have to help each other out. You have to help your neighbor. You have to stand by your family. You have to be loyal to the community. You have to be a part of the team. And that's a force of good, but it's also a force of bad in the way that in Beartown the team becomes more important than individuals. The team becomes more important than people. People become expendable.

If you only look at the best for the team, and then you create an environment, in this case with teenage boys, where they know from a very young age that their value as individuals, their value as human beings, is based on performance. It's not based on who they are as human beings. It's based on “How good are you at hockey?” If you are a really good hockey player, you're valuable to the team. Your value as a human being in this society, it increases. We will look at you differently. We will let you get away with stuff that we would never let you get away with if you were not a great hockey player.

And then, from there, the story grows in Beartown. It grows about a crime, about a horrible crime that a young man commits. And when his word stands against the word of a young woman, then that whole community has to grapple with the fact that if she's lying, then everything will go on as before, nothing will change. Your bubble will be intact. Your happy place will be your happy place. You and your neighbors and everyone will still be friends, and everything will just go on like it always has. So, it's impossible for a lot of them to not hope and not want that she's the one who's lying, because then there will be no problems.

But if he's the one who's lying, then everything changes, everything. Then you're at a point where the team won't win, the club might crumble, neighbors will fight, family members will fight. Everything that you have ever believed in as a community member will have to come in question. And everyone in this community will have to look themselves in the mirror and say, "Was I a part of this? Was I a part of this culture around this team where a young man thought that he was allowed to do this? Am I to blame? Am I standing on the right side of this?" The whole book series is about trying to do the right thing, trying to be a good person. And I'm trying to show that good, honest, decent people are capable of really bad things if they think that they're protecting something that they love. That's the whole basis of the story.

TF: That's true. Throughout the series, and certainly in The Winners, there is transformation that happens. I think maybe I'm reading too much into it, and this is my opinion, but so many of the characters you were talking about, they're afraid of change. They're protective of what they have, but once they do that self-reflection that you talked about, realize that things do change and you can become a better person without losing yourself, that's to me where things—you know, not everyone's perfect at it, it's not linear. But as the story progresses, I do see a lot of the main characters really transforming themselves and not losing the core of what it means to be from Beartown. I'm thinking of Maya in particular. Her move to the city—she's ready to abandon that whole identity, but realizes the value of that identity, and what she brings to that experience of university and following her love of music is only better for those fundamentals she got in Beartown. But she does change.

FB: Yeah, and I think also that I'm trying to tell a story about the values, the things you grew up with, the kind of person you are, and becoming an adult and realizing that the place that I come from, the things that I was maybe ashamed of. In Maya's case, she moves to a big city and realizes that all the things that I was trying to suppress, the things that I was a little ashamed of, being from a small town in the forest and having an accent that people in the big city make fun of, she realizes at some point that this is her strength. This is why she's stronger than the kids she meets in a big city, because she has had different kinds of adversities in life. She's overcome things that they haven't. And she understands the value, the strength of being an outsider.

And that is also the story about the town, about Beartown. Coming to terms with that—we are a small town and we're always underdogs and we're always underestimated and we're always in a fight. Because that's how this town feels, that we're always in a fight. We're in a fight for survival. We're in a fight for jobs. We're in a fight for our economy. Even in a fight versus nature, because they're in the middle of a forest and The Winners starts with a storm. This whole town is at odds with nature. Nature is trying to kill them all of the time. This town is in a fight all the time, but that's also their strength. That's why they're so hard to beat. And I think Maya, in a lot of ways, is the same.

TF: She brings that with her for sure. We don't know exactly where her life will go, but the way things are left, I have a good sense that she's going to be all right, in large part because of where she's from and how strong she is for having grown up where she did.

Why do you think your stories, Beartown in particular, translate so well with the English-speaking audience? With the US audience in particular?

FB: I don't know. I wish I did [laughing]. I wish I could hold seminars about it, but I don't. I think, first of all, the Swedish language helps. A lot of Swedish writers have done very well in translation. I am just one part in a long, long line of Scandinavian authors that have done very well abroad. And I wouldn't be here if they didn't pave the way.

I try to use the simplest words possible. And that comes from Astrid Lindgren, who's my hero, a children's book author [who] wrote Pippi Longstocking, among other things. And she's a national treasure in Sweden, and she was my best friend growing up, although I never met her. She was with me all the time. My way of writing comes a lot from her. And she had this thing that if there are 10 words possible, she would choose the simplest one. Because she wanted everyone to follow the story. She wanted everyone to come along. And that's the way that I write. I don't mind it if you don't like my books, but if you say that you didn't understand them, then I have failed.

So, the important thing is for me to be inclusive, to give everyone a chance to follow along. The highest compliment I can get is when people tell me, "I gave this book to someone who never reads books and they liked it. I gave this to a young person who doesn't read books and they read this, and now they're reading other books." I was the gateway to harder literature. And when that happens, that makes me prouder than anything.

And I think the fact that I write that way, and also that Swedish is a more narrow language in a lot of ways than English is. If you compare it to French, Swedish has one, possibly two words for “walk.” You can walk in one or two ways. But in French you can walk in 50 different ways. They have so many adjectives. They have so many synonyms. They have so many different ways to describe something. It's a very complex language, which makes it incredibly difficult to translate, because there are nuances in French that's pretty much impossible to pick up on if you are not fluent in French. I think Swedish is somewhat simpler. We use fewer words. I mean, there are, of course, a lot of synonyms and adjectives, but if you listen to the way that people talk, most people use the same words. They use the same way to express themselves. And I think this makes it easier to translate to English, because English also has a lot of adjectives, a lot of ways to describe something. It's easier when the language that you come from [is] narrow and the translation language is broad, then the translator has a lot of choices.

"I don't mind it if you don't like my books, but if you say that you didn't understand them, then I have failed."

So, the language part helps me. And I also think that Sweden has a storytelling tradition that kind of works with the American way to tell a story. I think there's recognizable traits. I mean, even our classics, our highbrow literature from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it's still strong, recognizable characters. It's still strong, recognizable stories, and it's still emotional, and it's still something that moves you. I come from that tradition, and I think that combination helps me.

TF: I agree. And with listening, there's a lot of humor in the book, and just some of the words struck me as funny. And I was wondering, like, “hooligans,” there's a lot of hooligans in Beartown, and I know what they are in English, but what is a hooligan in Swedish? Can you say hooligan in Swedish? What is that word?

FB: Huligan.

TF: Oh, so it's very similar.

FB: It's roughly the same. Instead of two O's it's one U, so huligan.

TF: Okay. Good to know. Now, do you have a favorite Swedish word or phrase?

FB: I think I like the curse words. If you're talking about translations, that was one of the things, early on in my career, that I discussed with my editor. I've had the same editor in America for my whole career, Peter Borland at Atria. I think that's a huge part of my success, because he's had eight years now to really get to know the way that I write. So, he's at the point now where he can read a translation from the translator and react and say, "This doesn't sound like Fredrick would phrase it.” He knows my rhythm, he knows my way of crafting a story.

But one of the few things that we've had discussions about is the fact that we have very many curse words that are not the f-bomb. And in America, as soon as you curse, people immediately go to the f-bomb. And then if it's not the f-bomb, then they tend to be very light curses, like “damn” or “god damn it.” And we have a lot of curses in between. So, we have a lot of, it's almost the f-bomb, but not quite. I use those a lot. People in my books, they curse a lot. But those curse words in Swedish, it's not as offensive in the way that many people find the f-bomb in America. It's the only thing that I can say that Swedish has more nuances than English. That we have a lot of curse words. I think in the UK you'll find that same thing. In the UK, they'll use the word bloody. But they'll use it in a way where you get, all right, this is a little harsher than damn.

TF: Right. This makes me think of your narrator, Marin Ireland.

FB: Yeah.

TF: She's one of my favorites. She's brilliant and she's so well matched to your work. And I think this whole idea of curse words and delivery, she can kind of put an edge on even the word "bugger." Different people call people a bugger at different times in this story. And it's like sometimes it has more of a thrashing than other times. Her performance is just magnificent in capturing, I think, that nuance just in her delivery as opposed to the word choices. It's like the same word told in different ways. And every character is distinct. Have you listened to Marin Ireland's performances of your works in English?

FB: Oh yeah. It's always strange. It's not exactly the same, but it's a little bit like watching a movie adaptation. It's someone's interpretation of your work. You'll hear her say something in a way that was, "Oh, that's not quite how I intended it, but I get where you're coming from."

TF: Right.

FB: I think writers are different, but for me, I always write it with the intention of you to read it. You have to be one or the other. You have to write it in a way that this is the experience that I intend for you. And if it works in other ways too, then that's a bonus. And that's the way that I am with audiobooks, that I write this to be read. I can only hear it in my head. And then fingers crossed that it works. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

And then sometimes you get lucky that someone like Marin finds the book, reads the book, and she finds something in it that connects to her, and all of a sudden she makes an interpretation of it and it works. And she kind of elevates it a little bit. She found little things in it that the listener to the audiobook will get that maybe the reader of the book didn't get. You as a listener will almost find, "Oh, that character. I'm connecting to that character more now," because of the way that she's doing that character, the way that that character sounds when coming from her.

It's an added experience when it works. But it's not a science. It's a little bit of magic to it. It either works or it doesn't. It's like hearing someone sing and you can hear someone sing everything perfectly, but you don't feel anything. And then you hear someone else sing in the same song and they don't have as great of a voice by any means but all of a sudden you're crying because you can hear they mean it. I think it only works if the person reading it really connected to something. I don't know exactly what part of it that Marin connected to, but I do have the feeling—she keeps saying yes when the publisher asks her to do it—I'm assuming that she found something in it that she liked and something that she recognized and connected to. And in many ways, she made the story bigger.

TF: I agree. I love her performance, and the fact that we have her through all three books was a requirement to me as a fan and a listener and an audiobook person. That consistency really helps because it is so immersive to listen.

FB: I think it's tremendously important to have the same voice all throughout. I think the listeners forget my name. Because my voice is not there. It's her voice. And I think it becomes her story in a lot of ways. I also think that maybe it works because I always viewed the narrative voice as a woman. Many people over the years have told me that the way I write is maybe more feminine, if you can say that. But maybe more like it keeps occurring to people, when they say, "Oh, I started [reading] this and I didn't know the name of the author, and I thought it was a woman who wrote it."

"Sometimes you get lucky that someone like Marin finds the book, reads the book, and she finds something in it that connects to her, and all of a sudden she makes an interpretation of it and it works. And she kind of elevates it a little bit."

And I think in the beginning of my career, I struggled a bit with it because I didn't really know what that meant. Is this a compliment? Is this an insult? Is this good? Is this bad? I don't know. But I think as the years went by, I talked with my mom about it. She reads more books than any person alive, I think. And she's just obsessed with reading and always [has] been. And she said, "Well, Fredrik, all of the writers that you liked when you were a kid were women. All of the writers that you enjoyed, the authors that you grew up with, they were all women." So, I think that way of storytelling comes from that. As a writer, I think I was raised by women.

TF: That's interesting. I could see where that's coming from. One thing I wanted to mention to you, and we talked a bit about TV and film, and I know that you've had several of your works become movies and TV shows here in the States, in Sweden. What do you have in the works along those lines right now?

FB: Honestly, I don't know all of the projects because what we have done is that my wife stepped in around 2017 at a point where I just couldn't cope anymore. Because you become a writer and then all of a sudden you are the CEO of a company. And you meet people at the publishing house who tell you, “You are a brand. You have to think about your brand, and you're a company and you have to take business decisions like you're the CEO of a company.” And I think most writers are very badly suited for that. I think it's the worst possible combination of characteristics. I mean, I sit alone in a room eight hours a day with people who [don't] exist. I wasn't coping well. I didn't handle pressure well. I hated being in meetings. I despised being in negotiations and discussions and phone calls. I just, I hated it so much, and it broke me. I had a breakdown and had to go to therapy and deal with the stress and the press and everything of it.

My wife stepped in. She quit her job. She was in sales. She was a key account manager at a huge radio conglomerate in Scandinavia. She had a very good career and a very successful one. She's incredible at sales and the business part of it. So, she stepped in and she said, "Well, I'm going to take over the company part. I'll deal with everything, but you have to let me be in charge. I can't be in a meeting and say, ‘Oh, I have to ask Fredrik.’ I have to be able to make decisions." We made that agreement, my wife and I. I'm in charge of everything that's in imagination, and she's in charge of everything that’s in reality. She's the CEO of reality.

And it works. And also because I think that I take everything personally, and she takes nothing personally. She can be in discussion, if you are talking about a movie and even if you're talking about an audiobook, sometimes there are choices that have to be made creatively along the way, and it's hard for people to have that discussion with me because everything is personal to me. And so sometimes they have to go to my wife and say, "All right, this is what we need to do. This is the way that we have to do this. The movie cannot be 19 hours long. We have to take away some things from his book." And they can have that discussion with her without her taking it personally. I can't. So that's how we constructed it. I think there’s always talks about maybe more movies from the other books. We'll see what happens with Beartown.

TF: In this newfound freedom that you have with this lovely balance that you have with your wife on the more business side, do you feel more free writing-wise? Are you working on anything new that you're excited about on the book front?

FB: I always have 10 projects at a time in my head running around, and I can have a project running in my head for years. It starts out as one thing and then it becomes another thing. The whole Beartown series to begin with was me trying to write a TV show. I had this idea for a TV show, and I wrote a script for, I think, the first three episodes. And then I realized making a TV show, it's 99 percent meetings and I hate meetings. I decided that this is not going to work out. And I said, "You know what? I'll write it as a novel and then you can run with it." And then it became a TV show based on a novel, which was, we figured out, the best way for me to do things.

And Anxious People, that was an idea I had for I think three or four years, even longer maybe. I had this idea and for a hostage situation at an open house, and it was going to be a comedy. And then it took me four years, and I sat down and I tried to write it as a play, as like a theater play. If you listen to it now or you read it now, you can see little pieces of that. Like, "Oh, this makes sense, he started writing as a play. It's constructed like a play."

"If you read The Winners and you feel something, you have an emotional response to [Benji], it's because I lost him. I feel like I wrote that book losing him."

I write things all the time. I wrote a novel this spring, a full novel and realized when I was finished that it's not quite there. It's not quite done. I don't really know what it is and sometimes you have that. This is 300 pages, but I don't really know what it is. I don't know what I'm trying to say. I don't know what this story is about. But then you have a skeleton. I usually say to people that it's like a car mechanic having a bunch of old cars standing in the yard. It's spare parts. Like, all of a sudden you're writing another story and you're like, "Oh, that character from that thing that I wrote and I never published, that character is going in here." So, I always have 10 stories running around in my head at a time. And then usually I realize that seven of them are crap, and then three of them are left. And those three, often enough, merge into one story and then that's something.

TF: Well, we'll be looking forward to it, no matter what it is. And this conclusion to Beartown, The Winners, I think it's a lovely conclusion to the story. It works. Is there a character that you'll miss the most?

FB: I mean, to me, I think a lot of Peter and Kira, who were not the main characters but the story is always centered around them in one way or another, of course, because they're the closest to me. They're closest to me in age, and they're parents. A lot of everything that I write is about parenting, I think, because I struggle so much with being a parent and being a good parent and trying to be an okay dad. So, a lot of the emotional baggage that [these characters] are carrying around comes from me. They're struggling with their marriage and they're struggling with themselves, and they're just trying to get through the day with everyone that they love being somewhat okay. So, I think they've always been the core for me. The way they fight is always based on the way that me and my wife fight. But the other way around. I'm her, she's him. I'm emotional in the same way that Kira is emotional, I think. Use a lot of words when I fight. My wife is silent and pragmatic and practical, like Peter is. But I think from the point of view of the readers, by far the most letters, the most comments, the most the people want to talk to me about at signings is Benji.

TF: Mm-hmm.

FB: I don't think I've ever written anything that affects as many people as deeply as he does. And I didn't intend to, I didn't know that I was doing that. It was not constructed to begin with. But he just struck a nerve in so many people, and so many people could relate and understand him. It's been incredibly hard to write his story. It took a lot out of me. And he's taken also a lot of research, not in the way that you read facts in a book, but in the way that I had to go talk to a lot of people who are close to him in some way, who know him, who [have] a bit of him in them. A lot of people who had to tell me how they've struggled, how they worked through being an outsider. Because he is always an outsider. He's always on the wrong side of a fence somewhere. He's always struggling so much with who he is and who people want him to be and what is expected of him and what he feels that he is.

There's an emptiness not writing about him. There is. There's a certain void now that, if you read The Winners and you feel something, you have an emotional response to him, it's because I lost him. I feel like I wrote that book losing him. If you feel something, it's because of that. Because I had to dig very deep and I had to construct him in a lot of ways from people that I've lost and friends of mine who died, who I lost young and who had the darkness, and just things I was struggling with. I constructed him in a lot of ways from them. So, he became deeply personal to me. And I wrote The Winners through that, I think.

TF: That shines through. It's almost something that's too hard to talk about with Benji, because it is so heartbreaking. But for me, he's the character that you don't necessarily identify with the most, but you’ve fallen in love with the most, and kind of other characters are the better for having had him in their lives. And that's how I feel about having had him in my life too.

FB: Benji was the one I think why The Winners took so long to write. It's why it was such a struggle for me to write it. And it took so much out of it because all through that book, I had to again and again force myself to not think about that people are actually going to read this. Force myself to not trying to do something that aligns with people's expectations or hopes or what they want. I had to block that out. And it's a hard process, and you have to do it over and over and over again. It's like, you have to come back to that center of, I'm just going to write the story the way I intended it to begin with. I'm just going to follow the arc that I always saw this story going. I have to be truthful to the story, to me, to the people that I base the characters on.

Because I didn't know when I was writing Beartown, I didn't know the impact that certain characters would have. And of course, when the first time you've been at a signing and someone comes up to you and they start talking about a certain character and they start crying because it hits so close to home, they're not crying because of the character. They're crying because the character reminds them of something in their own lives. It hits them in that way. So, the first time that's happened, then you feel a responsibility and you feel a pressure and you feel a weight of expectations that, "Oh, now I have to write something that you will feel less strongly about." That's a big part of the fact that The Winners took so long for me to write. You give it your everything, you put it out, and you hope for the best.

TF: I truly appreciate your process, and I think that's important. For me, it does come through that you weren't trying to write to make a nice, neat ending. Love hearing about the process, where it came from, just how much of yourself you put into it. I just want to thank you so much for this story. It is a great ending. It's a great beginning. Anyone listening to us now who hasn't dipped in yet, start now. Beartown is a great listen.

FB: Thank you.

TF: Thank you. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thank you, Fredrik, for being here today.

FB: Thank you for having me.

TF: And you can purchase, download, and listen to The Winners right now on Audible.com.