62 pages • 2 hours read
Fredrik BackmanMy Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Tobacco”
Chapter 1 introduces seven-year-old Elsa. Elsa is different from other children her age and has trouble fitting in at school. Granny is Elsa’s only friend, and Elsa’s personal superhero. According to Granny, “Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. Anyone who doesn’t agree needs their head examined” (1). Granny used to be a doctor, who traveled to the most dangerous, war-torn places in the world. Her superpowers, according to Elsa, are “saving lives and driving people nuts” (3).
The story begins with Elsa and Granny at the police station. Earlier in the day, Granny left the hospital where she is an inpatient and broke into a zoo with Elsa. Elsa wants Granny to apologize to the police officers so they will be allowed to leave, but Granny refuses to admit she did anything wrong. They begin to argue in their “secret language.” Eventually a policewoman with green eyes who is familiar with Granny allows them to leave, but not before warning Granny that she needs to “stop doing this, we also have real criminals to worry about” (9).
Elsa remembers that her beloved Gryffindor scarf was torn by bullies at school earlier in the day, and she begins to cry. She knows that Granny broke into the zoo that evening to distract her from the bullies and her scarf, and so that she would have an entirely different memory of the day. Granny admits this is true, saying, “If you can’t get rid of the bad, you have to top it up with more goody stuffy” (11).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Monkey”
Mum picks up Granny and Elsa from the police station. Elsa falls asleep in the car, and “by the time they were on the highway, she was already in Miamas” (12). Miamas is the name given to one of the six kingdoms of the Land-of-Almost-Awake in Granny’s fairy tales. Granny began inventing the fairy tales for Elsa years ago, when Mum and Dad got divorced and Elsa was afraid of going to sleep.
When Elsa wakes up, she is in Granny’s hospital room, and Granny and Mum are arguing about Granny’s irresponsible behavior as usual. Mum criticizes Granny for smoking in the room, endangering the health of both Elsa and Mum’s unborn child, Halfie.
Before Elsa leaves, Granny instructs her to give a bag of chocolates to “Our Friend” and to “tell him your granny sent you to tell him she’s sorry” (21). Elsa is terrified by the assignment but nevertheless agrees. Granny tells her she must deliver the chocolate without the knowledge of Britt-Marie, a bossy, nosy neighbor who has a contentious relationship with Granny.
Just before leaving the hospital, Elsa runs back to Granny’s room to retrieve her forgotten scarf. Outside Granny’s room, she hears Granny talking on the phone to someone named Marcel. Granny says that Elsa must be given the “responsibility,” as she is the only one capable of making the right decision. The last words Elsa hears Granny say are “I don’t want Elsa to know that I am going to die because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes, Marcel. And one of their superpowers ought to be that they can’t get cancer” (23). Elsa leaves the hospital in tears.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Coffee”
Elsa’s apartment building has four floors. Granny lives on the top floor across from Mum, Elsa, and Mum’s boyfriend George. The other tenants in the building include Kent and his wife Britt-Marie, who according to Granny is “a full-time nag-bag who will forever be the bane of my life” (26); the woman with the black skirt, who “never says hello and […] never smiles” (26); Lennart and Maud, the nicest people in the world; Alf, the taxi driver; the boy with the syndrome and his mother; and The Monster, Elsa’s name for the tenant everyone is afraid of but no one ever sees.
That evening during the residents’ monthly meeting, Elsa sneaks away to Our Friend, a gigantic black hound with a terrifying bark who lives in the apartment next door to The Monster. Though Elsa is afraid, she feeds him the chocolates through the mail slot, telling him that her granny is sorry for not bringing him sweets for a long time. She adds that Granny is ill with cancer.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Beer”
Elsa plays Monopoly with Granny in her hospital room. Granny says she has another mission for her and gives her an envelope containing a letter and a key, with instructions to open the envelope tomorrow and embark on a great treasure hunt.
Granny is very fond of treasure hunts, as well as fairy tales. All of Granny’s fairy tales are stories about the Land-of-Almost-Awake. She started telling the stories to Elsa when she was a little girl, and she always tells them in their “secret language.” Elsa assumes the purpose of the stories is to help her get to sleep, as well as to practice the secret language, but “lately the stories have another dimension. Something Elsa can’t quite put her finger on” (39).
Granny tells Elsa that she must “give the letter to him who’s waiting. […] Tell him your granny asked you to tell him she’s sorry” (42). She implores Elsa to “Protect the castle […] Protect your family. Protect your friends!”(41).
Elsa and Granny eat cinnamon buns and fall asleep together in Granny’s hospital bed. That night, across town, the hound wakes everyone in the building with his howling, which sounds like he is “singing with the sorrow and yearning of ten thousand fairy tales” (44). In the morning, Elsa wakes up, but “Granny is still in Miamas” (44).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Lilies”
Elsa is sitting on a bench outside the undertaker’s, waiting for Mum. She remembers lying on Granny’s bed and looking at the photographs taped to the ceiling. The photographs are from long ago and show Granny surrounded by doctors, men with rifles, and children with bandages. Elsa has always been particularly drawn to one photograph of a child she calls Werewolf Boy.
Elsa closes her eyes and smells Granny’s brand of tobacco. When she opens her eyes, she sees a slim man smoking a cigarette. Though the smell of the tobacco is initially comforting, as it’s the same kind Granny smoked, for some reason she feels afraid of the man. She runs inside, to the room where Granny is lying in her coffin. She tells Granny she no longer wants to be part of the treasure hunt, and “I don’t know how to get to Miamas if you’re dead” (53).
Mum picks up Elsa and puts her in the car. Elsa has opened Granny’s letter, but it is written in another language, and she can’t understand it except for one word: “Miamas.” However, she can see that the name on the envelope is the same name that is on The Monster’s mailbox.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is told through the third-person point of view, from the perspective of seven-year-old Elsa. The reader is only aware of events and information as Elsa herself uncovers them. It is not clear, for example, why Granny is in the hospital until the end of Chapter 2, when Elsa overhears her telling Marcel that she has cancer. In this way, author Fredrik Backman allows the reader to participate in the same sense of discovery that Elsa experiences throughout her “treasure hunt.”
Conformity is a value held by most of the people in Elsa’s life. At seven, Elsa stands out due to her precocious nature: she has a highly developed vocabulary, she does her own research on the internet, and she corrects other people’s grammar. Being different is considered a negative trait by all except Granny, who says that “all the best people are different” (1). Elsa believes her, and yet being different has resulted in her having no friends at all, except for Granny.
Through Elsa’s descriptions, Granny emerges as an eccentric with diametrically opposing characteristics. On the one hand, Granny is a retired surgeon who “won prizes and saved lives and fought evil everywhere on earth” (2). On the other hand, Granny is impulsive, reckless, and chaotic. She routinely flouts rules and conventions, such as when she insists on smoking indoors, or when she deals with door-to-door evangelists by shooting at them with a paint gun. In stark contrast to Granny, “Mum’s superpower is perfection” (17). She is careful and organized and orderly, always in control of her words and actions. Though there is often tension between Mum and Granny due to their opposing natures, Elsa loves them both and often feels caught in the middle of their conflicts.
Elsa is a voracious reader, and her favorite literary character is Harry Potter. Elsa shares certain qualities with Harry, such as uniqueness and courage. Everywhere she goes, Elsa wears her Gryffindor scarf, a symbol of the House of Gryffindor in the Harry Potter novels, which is known for daring, nerve, and chivalry. Therefore, the scarf symbolizes Elsa’s own bravery.
Early in the novel, Elsa believes that the secret language she shares with Granny, as well as the Land-of-Almost-Awake, is theirs alone. This was comforting to Elsa, because both Granny and the fairy tales protected Elsa from the harshness of the real world. As Elsa says, “Granny has a story from Miamas for every situation” (38). When Elsa loses the power to imagine herself in Miamas after Granny dies, this implies that Elsa is still very dependent on Granny and feels unsafe without her. When Elsa tries to read Granny’s letter to The Monster, the only word she can recognize is Miamas. Elsa must face the truth that the fairy tales did not belong to her and Granny alone, and that Granny had secrets that she did not share with Elsa.
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By Fredrik Backman
