“. . . sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.”
Anxious People was one of the first books I read this year, and I can already tell it is going to be one of my favorites. Written by New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman, Anxious People was published April 25, 2019, and was adapted into a Netflix limited series in 2021. The story follows a group of people who have nothing in common but that they have all found themselves in the same place at the wrong time. Before you decide to read this book, I would suggest checking out the book’s trigger warnings, as there are some themes that may be sensitive to some readers.
The story begins with a bank robber, who isn’t really a bank robber, who tries to rob a bank. “Tries” being the key phrase here. When the bank robber flees the scene, they accidentally take a group of people hostage who were at an open house looking at an apartment. These eight strangers turn out to be the worst hostages ever, just as the bank robber is the worst bank robber ever. Each person has their own backstory, their own pains, and passions. These eight strangers with nothing in common are all connected to each other in one way or another, though none of them are aware of it. Throughout the hostage situation, it becomes clear to the strangers that their captor may need more saving than they ever did. Reluctant allies, the group bonds together, and learn more about each other than they ever knew about themselves before that fateful day. The story also follows two police officers and a physiatrist, who are connected to this story in ways that will shock you.
This book has quickly become one of my personal favorites and what I would declare a must read. It will make you laugh as much as it will make you cry. It’s truly one of the moments where you will wonder if the author crawled inside your head. The themes are so universally human, yet they feel extremely personal. You will feel both individually represented and simultaneously connected to other human beings around you. This is a book about a group of strangers, a bank robber, and a hostage situation, but it is so much more than that. There is a quote from the book that I believe captures the heart of the story: “Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might think.”
There are many circumstances that can lead us down so many different paths. What if you were born into a different family? What if you studied something different in college? What if you never met your current partner? This book captures the fact that we are all just a few wrong steps away from misfortunes. That there is sometimes a gray area between what is good and what is bad. That we could easily have been that homeless person on the street or that man standing on the bridge, and we should have empathy for those people as if they were us. Because, at the end of the day, we are all the same. We are all human.
Funny, relatable, tragic, and totally unique, Anxious People is a modern classic that captures the human experience and explores what it means to be a good person, and what even a good person will do when they’ve run out of options. It questions how we as human beings fit into a system that we have created, and the areas in which that system fails us. At the root of it, this book is about accepting one another, and understanding that we all, hostages and captors, bank tellers and bank robbers, heroes, and criminals, are human.
By Ally Orsini, CambridgeEditors Team
CambridgeEditors' Blog 