Anxious People, By Fredrik Backman

In the novel Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman, Backman employs a broad use of language and tone to characterize the robber as a loving mother who only wants the best for her kids. Thereafter, Backman then associates the robber and her family with an intricate motif, one based on a drawing the robber's daughter made. The drawing depicts the robber and her two daughters where the robber is illustrated as an elk and her two kids as a frog and monkey respectively. With this detail analyzed further, one can allude to the fact that Backman utilized the motif of a drawing based on the robber and her daughters to imply that the bonds between a family play a crucial role in one’s motives or actions. The drawing aforementioned is applied on multiple

This reveals that she wouldn’t have gone through with the robbery or even thought about it if not to prevent her ex-husband from “tak[ing] [her] daughters away,” which would’ve caused severe distress for her daughters as they wouldn’t be

Specifically in the time when Estelle is revealed to have “a crumpled drawing of a monkey and a frog and an elk” “[o]n the door of [her] fridge” (Backman 312). The reason for Estelle having the drawing in her house is because the robber and her daughters have moved into Estelle’s apartment as their new home, which by itself conveys how the robber continues to keep her daughters in mind when deciding to move into Estelle’s apartment as she did it to retain custody of them. Moreover, the detail of the drawing being “crumpled” indicates how the robber was thrown around through many conflicts for her daughters, as well as it also demonstrates how the robber and her daughters’ relationship was affected in some way because of the robber and her husband's divorce, yet their bond remains intact. Ultimately, the details add up to convey how the robber ended up living in the apartment and going through the conflict of escaping the police all to stay with her daughters, as she didn’t want them to have a mom like hers, who was a “chaotic parent” and an alcoholic (Backman 54). This in itself aids the author's representation of the motif in his work as a whole as it portrays the dedication the robber had to be able to unite with her