Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Stephanie Schroeder

Author:    Fredrik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

341 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:   E-book

Summary

In Anxious People, a bank robber walks into an apartment open house after failing to actually rob the bank and holds an unlikely mix of strangers hostage.  The captives include a recently retired couple who buy fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage, a wealthy banker who has shut herself off from the world, a young, nervous couple pregnant with their first child, an 87 year old, feisty woman, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom.  As the police try to free the hostages, we learn surprising truths about each of them, including the ultimately sympathetic bank robber.

Quotes 

“Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else’s children can swim.”

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”

 

 “The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”

 

“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”

 

 “Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”

 

“This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

 

“Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.”

 

“We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”

 

“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

 

“God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”

 

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?”

“No.”

“You’re never more important that you are then.”

 

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

 

“Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.”

 

“that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”

 

“We’re trying to be grown-up and love each other and understand how the hell you’re supposed to insert USB leads. We’re looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We’re doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.  Perhaps we hurried past each other in a crowd today, and neither of us noticed, and the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for single moment and then we were gone. I don’t know who you are.  But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well. There’ll be another one along tomorrow.”

 

“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”

 

“Something my dad says…He says you end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.”

 

“Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.”

 

“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

 

“We are asleep until we fall in love.”

 

“You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”

 

“You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime.”

 

“children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving.”

 

“This book is dedicated to the voices inside my head, the most remarkable of my friends.  And to my wife, who lives with us.”

 My Take

Anxious People is the sixth book that I have read by best-selling Swedisth author Fredrik Backman (previous reads were:  A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Us Against You, Britt-Marie Was Here  And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer) and I like his wry, insightful style that peels back the layers of human nature.  He always has something interesting to say about the way human beings function and interact with each other and Anxious People is one of his better efforts.