Things My Son Needs to Know about the World

Fredrik Backman

• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501196867
• eBook ISBN: 9781501194764
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove shares an irresistible and moving collection of heartfelt, humorous essays about fatherhood, providing his newborn son with the perspective and tools he’ll need to make his way in the world.

Things My Son Needs to Know About the World collects the personal dispatches from the front lines of one of the most daunting experiences any man can experience: fatherhood.

As he conveys his profound awe at experiencing all the “firsts” that fill him with wonder and catch him completely unprepared, Fredrik Backman doesn’t shy away from revealing his own false steps and fatherly flaws, tackling issues both great and small, from masculinity and mid-life crises to practical jokes and poop.

In between the sleep-deprived lows and wonderful highs, Backman takes a step back to share the true story of falling in love with a woman who is his complete opposite, and learning to live a life that revolves around the people you care about unconditionally. Alternating between humorous side notes and longer essays offering his son advice as he grows up and ventures out into the world, Backman relays the big and small lessons in life, including:

-How to find the team you belong to
-Why airports explain everything about religion and war
-The reason starting a band is crucial to cultivating and keeping friendships
-How to beat Monkey Island 3
-Why, sometimes, a dad might hold onto his son’s hand just a little too tight

This is an irresistible and insightful collection, perfect for new parents and fans of Backman’s “unparalleled understanding of human nature” (Shelf Awareness). As he eloquently reminds us, “You can be whatever you want to be, but that’s nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are.”

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WHEN I HOLD YOUR HAND A LITTLE TOO TIGHT

You’re going to meet a lot of people in your life who’ll try to tell you what the meaning of it all is. What we live for. Some of the brightest minds in world history have tried to sum it up. Musicians, authors, politicians, philosophers, artists, poets. They’ve talked about the transitory nature of life, about its irony, its passion, its desire, and its magic.

They’ve said and written grand, wonderful things.

I hope you get to read and hear all of them, because there’s something so special in that experience, in falling in love with words. Feeling them like fluttering butterflies beneath your skin. Like whirlwinds in your head. Like a punch to the gut.

I’ve read the works of thinkers and prophets. The holy books, and the most unholy. I’ve benefited from mankind’s most brilliant brains devoting entire lifetimes to explaining who we really are. What the hell we’re doing here.

What life is all about.

But nothing has hit me as hard as this one line: “Life’s a game of inches.”

Al Pacino said that. In the locker room just before the final game in Any Given Sunday. Damn good film, that. There are people who will try to tell you that you need to love sports films or at least like football to be able to really appreciate it. But they’ve got it all wrong.

“[L]ife’s this game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small… One half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch.”

There are people, and purely hypothetically we could call them “your mother,” who will shake their heads and sigh so deeply that they need to pause halfway to take in more air every time I show you that film. But you and I know better.

Because life is all about the small margins.

A few inches here or there.

The job ad that took me to Stockholm might have been five inches. The stamp to get on the subway may be one. The threshold I stepped over at the very same moment I saw your mother for the first time might have been three. The first bed we slept in was about thirty-five.

Two birth cities can be two thousand miles apart. A first home can be two hundred square feet. A boy can be born and be nineteen inches.

A bullet can be 22 millimeters.

There’s nothing from your childhood that I’ll owe you a bigger apology for than always trying to impress you. So I guess I’ll save this until you’re old enough to think I’m so boring that I’ve probably never experienced anything exciting at all.

That’s when I’ll show you the scar and tell you about that day a few years before you were born.

And sure, in all honesty, you probably won’t think I’m even an ounce cooler for it. But still. I’ll take what I can.

The police said it was just an ordinary robbery. The kind that happens in banks and post offices and shops almost every day. “The important thing is that you realize this wasn’t anything personal,” they repeated over and over again. No one really knows exactly what happened. A couple of men with guns and another group of people in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess, that’s all. Like all robberies. Maybe the robbers got stressed out, maybe what happened next was more an accident than anything else. Hard to say.

But by the time they ran off, one of them had shot someone.

And I don’t want to teach you to mouth off at the police or anything. But it’s quite difficult to get shot and not “take it personally.” Let’s just leave it at that.

The bullet entered my thigh about four inches above my knee and burrowed through my flesh into my thighbone. Not that I knew that at the time, of course. One funny thing about being shot is that you don’t really have time to perceive where you’ve been shot, when you are, in fact, shot. So it might have taken a second or two before I even realized that the gun had actually gone off, and that it’d been aimed at me. And then it took me another second to realize that it hadn’t been aimed at my head.

People ask me all the time now whether I was afraid of dying. They say that your life is meant to flash before your eyes when it happens. And maybe it did for me too. But all I really remember is that the robbers had forced every one of us onto the floor, and then they took our cell phones and watches. And your mother had given me that watch for Christmas just a few weeks before.

We’d only been a couple for a few months, back then. And when the gun went off, I know that my first thought was that I might never see her again. And then I thought about what my father always said when I caused trouble as a child:

“What the hell, Fredrik, why does EVERYTHING always happen to YOU?!”

And then there were probably a few seconds there where I thought that if I did see your mother again, she would probably be all annoyed by the fact that I can’t even be given a nice watch without going off and getting myself shot.

I’m hard to live with like that.

And people keep asking me if I was afraid of dying. But… no. And that’s not because I’m especially macho or excessively brave or have an incredibly high pain threshold, but just because I kind of instinctively decided that this was probably one of those situations where it might be a good time to act like an adult. For once. “Survival instinct,” biologists probably call it. “Good upbringing,” if you ask your grandmother.

But me, I just thought that if I didn’t lie completely still and keep quiet, the next bullet would probably end up in my neck. So I just lay there and kept my mouth shut. And when the robber raised the gun again, and fired it down into the floor, I thought that bullet had hit me too.

That’s when I thought I would die.

My memories are a bit of a mess after that. But I heard sneakers running off. A door slamming shut. A car outside, tearing off. Worried voices shouting for me to lie still. I tried to get up anyway, of course, since I, well, you know. I’m kind of an idiot.

I remember my feet moving in thin air, and it was a bit like how I imagine cartoon characters feel in that second when they realize they’ve run over the edge of a cliff.

And then: the pain.

A pulsing merciless pain in my leg so massive that it consumed every ounce of my comprehension for what felt like a lifetime. As though someone were shooting me over and over and over again and again, only the bullets were coming from inside my body, out through my flesh, rather than the other way around.

I don’t know how long I was lying on that floor. That pain is all I remember.

The next thing I recall is the police. Then the paramedics. I know that I started shouting at one of them because he said, “The helicopter’s landed.” Because I don’t like flying. So I shouted something about how he could just bloody forget about getting me on that goddamn thing! And, well, as it turned out, he hadn’t said anything about a helicopter at all. No one really knows where I got that from. Funny how the mind works.

And then they gave me enough drugs to make a racehorse sit down and drink a Dr Pepper and download Wordfeud on its phone.

---

From then on, all this really was much harder for your mother than it was for me. Being shot is actually the closest I’ve ever come to being a rock star. Everyone takes really good care of you.

Your mother, on the other hand, just got a phone call while she was at work, from someone saying I was on the way to the hospital. They weren’t allowed to give her any details. Nothing about where I’d been shot, just that I had been, and that she needed to come in immediately. She had to jump into a taxi not knowing whether I would be alive or dead when she arrived. She had to contact my friends. She had to call my mom.

But me? I got morphine.

Not that I’m in any way encouraging you to take drugs, that is. I honestly only have very limited experience of them myself. There was that one incident when I was twenty, and I went to Thailand for a few months. I went to a party and fell asleep on a beach and woke up on a whole other island wearing a T-shirt someone had written wasabi on with a permanent marker. For the next two weeks, I had an insatiable craving for onion-flavor chips and tomato juice. And after that, I decided that this whole drug thing probably wasn’t for me.

But morphine. Holy smoke, dude.

All I remember is that the nurses lifted me onto a stretcher and that I was singing. It’s not altogether clear exactly what song, but I think it was “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” by Iron Maiden. And then I remember a nurse taking my hand and whispering gently that they needed to roll me onto one side and that I shouldn’t be scared. I know I had time to wonder what the hell I had to be scared of now that I was in the hospital, unless she was planning on pulling a gun of her own. I think I even joked about it. She smiled the way salesclerks tend to smile when I tell a great story and they don’t want to be rude. And then the nurses rolled me onto my side, and I felt four pairs of hands frantically searching my back. It wasn’t until then that I realized there was so mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• To My Son
• What You Need to Know About Motion-Sensitive Bathroom Lights
• What You Need to Know About IKEA
• What You Need to Know About Soccer
• What You Need to Know About Stuff
• What You Need to Know About Being a Man
• What You Need to Know About God and Airports
• What You Need to Know About What Happened to the Singing Plastic Giraffe
• What You Need to Know About Why That Felicia Girl’s Mother Hates Me
• What You Need to Know About Good and Evil
• What You Need to Know About Starting a Band
• What You Need to Know About Love
• What You Need to Know About When I Hold Your Hand a Little Too Tight
• ‘Anxious People’ Teaser
• About the Author
• Copyright