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 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Dust”
Elsa, The Monster, and the wurse walk for two hours to reach the address on the envelope, which turns out to be a therapist’s office. The office is empty, so Elsa and The Monster wait for the therapist to return.
Elsa again prods The Monster for some information about his past. He tells her that Granny rescued him from a refugee camp. After a series of bad foster homes, he came to live in her building. She told him the same fairy tales that she later told Elsa about the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the kingdom of Miamas. The Monster tells Elsa that Miamas means “I love” in his mother’s language. Elsa realizes that all the trips Granny took during Mum’s childhood were attempts to find The Monster’s mother. This upsets Elsa, who says, “My grandmother was also someone’s mother. Did you ever think about that?” (167).
The therapist arrives, and she turns out to be the woman in the black skirt. Elsa gives her the letter from Granny. As the woman leads Elsa into her office, Elsa looks around for The Monster, whom she now calls Wolfheart, but he has vanished. The woman in the black skirt explains that Wolfheart came to see her once before with Granny, and that he is frightened of her.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Cinnamon Bun”
The woman explains that Granny brought Wolfheart to her office because she thought the woman could help him. The woman says Wolfheart is scared of his memories because he “has lived almost his whole life at war, in one way or another. It does...does unbearable things to a human” (173).
Elsa asks the woman about the tsunami, but she is reluctant to discuss it. Elsa tells the woman a joke, and the woman becomes agitated, asking her to leave. Frustrated after realizing the woman won’t help her move forward with the treasure hunt, Elsa calls her a drunk. The woman flies into a rage, and “her face is contorted into a thousand broken pieces of mirror” (179). Elsa runs out of her office.
Downstairs in the vestibule, Elsa cries while hugging the wurse. Alf appears and drives her home. He says that Granny would have “beaten the life out of me if I hadn’t picked you up” (180). On the way home he gives her a cinnamon bun from Granny’s favorite bakery.
When they arrive at their building, Elsa runs upstairs to her apartment without saying goodbye to Alf or the wurse. That night, when the drunk starts yelling and singing, Elsa “does what all the others in the house do. She pretends she doesn’t hear” (181).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Smoke”
That night Elsa has a nightmare that Miamas is burning, and all of Granny’s fairy tales along with it. The slim man with the cigarette appears in the dream. He points his finger at her, and the shadows engulf her.
When Elsa wakes up the next morning, Mum, Britt-Marie, Maud, Lennart, and Alf are in the hallway. Britt-Marie is upset because the landlords have contacted Mum, not Kent, about the possibility of selling them the apartments. Britt-Marie says that Kent is away on business, but he arrives at the apartment shortly after. Privately, Alf tells Elsa that the wurse is safe in the storage unit but that it is her responsibility, and she shouldn’t have run off the day before. Elsa agrees. She knows that she “abandoned it like Granny abandoned Mum and this scares her more than any nightmares” (188).
Alf explains to Elsa that Kent is anxious to obtain the leaseholds because he thinks he can make money by selling the apartment. Elsa begins to understand her nightmares. She recognizes that each of the tenants represents a character from Granny’s fairy tales, and that the house itself seems to be a part of the Land-of-Almost-Awake.
The landlords’ accountant arrives, and the adults go into the kitchen to discuss the leaseholds. Britt-Marie takes Elsa aside and tells her that a man was at the apartment looking for her yesterday. She describes him as a slim man smoking a cigarette. Elsa grows very frightened, as she knows this man is the dragon in her fairy-tale adventure.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Sponge Cake Mix”
Elsa visits the wurse at night. After feeding it cookies and sponge cake mix, she tells it about the man who is looking for her, and how she knows he is one of the shadows but doesn’t know where he came from. She confides, “Granny never told me about these kinds of dragons” (194).
They walk up the cellar stairs up the main vestibule, where Elsa smells the lingering scent of tobacco smoke—once again, it’s the same kind Granny smoked. This once-comforting smell triggers “a lingering fear from her nightmare [that] paralyzes her” (194). Elsa notes how quickly a smell’s association can change, “how close love and fear live to each other” (195).
As a newspaper blows by the vestibule window, Elsa recalls another memory of Granny. Once, Granny called the newspaper office, lambasting them for putting paper in her mail slot even after she put up a sign that read, “No junk mail, ever. Thanks!” (195), which incited a feud between Granny and the newspaper company.
Elsa meets Alf in the stairwell, and they leave the building together along with the wurse. Elsa asks Alf about the meeting with the accountant. The landlords have agreed to sell the apartments if the tenants unanimously agree to the deal, which Alf believes will never happen, since they argue constantly. He fears that if the deal goes through, he and some other leaseholders will not be able to afford the high monthly lease payments, and they will have to find somewhere else to live.
Elsa asks Alf if he had been in love with Granny, but he leaves without answering. Nevertheless, Elsa is happy, as she tells the wurse, “I think Alf is our friend now” (204).
Chapter 20 Summary: “Clothes Shop”
On the morning of Granny’s funeral, Elsa wakes up from another nightmare. She goes into Granny’s apartment, where she is currently hiding the wurse. Elsa finds her “moo-gun,” which Granny helped her make to chase away bad dreams.
George stops by Granny’s, but Elsa doesn’t speak to him. Elsa is sure that when Halfie is born, George will forget all about her. Therefore, she is determined to dislike him. Elsa’s reasoning is that “if you don’t like people, they can’t hurt you” (209).
The doorbell rings again, and this time it’s the woman with the black skirt. She apologizes for yelling at Elsa yesterday, admitting that it is hard for her to talk about her lost sons. Elsa asks if she, like Wolfheart, is broken, and the woman replies, “Broken in...in another way, maybe” (211). She reassures Elsa that Wolfheart often disappears, but he always comes back. She gives Elsa a book of fairy tales that her boys read when their granny died. The woman has bought some Harry Potter books, which she plans to read herself because they are Elsa’s favorites. Elsa asks if she believes in God, and the woman says sometimes it’s hard to, “because I wonder why there are tsunamis at all” (214). Before the woman leaves, Elsa invites her to come back to the gathering at her apartment after the burial.
Dad picks up Elsa, and they drive to the church for Granny’s funeral. Elsa asks Dad if she is similar to Granny. Dad evades the question at first but finally says Elsa got all her best qualities from Granny and Mum, but that he hopes she got a little of him as well. Elsa answers, “You gave me your words” (217), which makes Dad happy. He tells Elsa that having her makes him not want to have any more children, not because Elsa turned out different, but because she “turned out to be perfect” (218).
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
At this point, Elsa’s feelings toward The Monster are ambivalent. She wants to regard him as a friend but realizes “he’s only here because Granny told him” (162). Additionally, The Monster confirms that he had been a soldier, and Elsa is a pacifist. Still, there is a “tiny but mutual respect” between them, since Elsa knows “he understands what it’s like when people have secrets from you just because you’re a child” (166).
As a therapist, the woman with the black skirt sheds light on Wolfheart’s obsessive hand-washing: “Sometimes the brain does strange things to one after a tragedy. I think maybe he’s trying to wash away […] the blood” (173). Her words also reference her own destructive drinking habit.
The woman is triggered by Elsa’s “blind man” joke because it reminds her of her lost boys, who “used to tell jokes like that” (178). The pain of remembering is too much for her to bear, as when she stands up, her legs are “as fragile as the wings of paper planes” (178).
Elsa’s continued inability to get to Miamas, as well as her first nightmare, suggest that Elsa still feels vulnerable and defenseless without Granny. Now that Elsa has uncovered the connection between Granny’s fairy tales and the real world, her dream about Miamas burning takes on a greater—and more terrifying—meaning. Elsa fears that she is about to lose not only her beloved imaginary stories but also her own home. Her fears intensify when Britt-Marie confirms that the man with the cigarette is not just a figment of Elsa’s imagination. In Granny’s stories, he is the dragon, but he is a real person who exists in the real world, and he knows where Elsa lives.
The presence of the accountant “with the very friendly face” (190) at the residents’ meeting suggests that he will factor into Elsa’s treasure hunt, as he “winks at her as if they share a secret” (190).
It is significant that Elsa remembers the story about Granny and the unsolicited newspapers as she is walking with Alf and the wurse. Granny had waged her battle against the newspaper company entirely for Elsa’s sake, because Elsa was an environmentalist, and Granny was “the kind of person you brought along when you were going to war” (201). Though Elsa doesn’t quite figure out how Alf fits into the puzzle of Granny’s life, she does notice that “he watches their surroundings much like Wolfheart and the wurse. As if he’s also on guard duty” (201). Thus Elsa realizes that Alf, like Granny, is the sort of person who can be counted on to go to battle for you.
On the morning of Granny’s funeral, George makes several attempts to be especially solicitous toward Elsa, but she rebuffs him. Elsa is certain that he will forget all about her when Halfie is born, so it is better not to get close to him. In this way Elsa can be considered “broken” by her childhood isolation, much like how Wolfheart was broken by war and the woman in the black was broken by tragedy. Like them, Elsa retreats from connections that she fears will prove painful, reasoning that “if you don’t like people, they can’t hurt you” (209).
Elsa’s relationship with Dad grows strengthens with her ability to empathize. Earlier in the story, Elsa feels unable to connect with him, and most of the traits she associates with him are negative: he is tentative, he is indecisive, he doesn’t like to have fun. However, when he expresses hope that Elsa inherited some qualities from him, she remembers his word jar and realizes that he is responsible for her superior vocabulary. Instead of seeing his focus on word choice and grammar as overly obsessive and tedious, she views it as a great gift.
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