I just finished Fredrik Backman's Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, and I'm still processing the timing of it all.

Backman has been one of my favorite authors for years. I've read everything he's published. Eleven books, I think. His ability to capture the intimate, interpersonal moments of human connection while maintaining narrative momentum is something I deeply admire. When I started writing my own novel over a year ago, I consciously modeled the more personal chapters on his voice, the warmth and vulnerability he brings to character relationships.

But I didn't know about this book. His only work of nonfiction. A collection of essays written to his newborn son, alternating between humorous vignettes about motion-sensitive bathroom lights and deeper reflections on masculinity, belonging, and what it means to deliberately pass wisdom to the next generation.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Over a year ago, before I'd ever heard of this book, I started my own legacy project. Not a novel at first, just personal writing. Love letters to my wife about times I got things right and times I catastrophically failed. Letters of wisdom for my children. Reflections on faith, mistakes, growth, the messy reality of trying to live well.

The goal was simple: translate my lived experience into something my family could carry forward when I'm gone. Not advice they might absorb by accident or through cultural osmosis, but intentional, conscious transmission of what I've learned.

That project became the conceptual foundation for the novel I'm writing now. A father facing his mortality who prepares one final gift for his grieving family. Not just information, but relationship. Not just data, but love made tangible. The entire narrative hinges on that act of intentional legacy.

Then today, right in the middle of drafting Book 2, I finished Backman's essays.

And there it was. The same concept. The same driving conviction that fatherhood requires deliberate, thoughtful translation of experience into wisdom. That our children deserve more than what we accidentally leave behind. They deserve what we choose to give them.

He wrote essays about soccer and practical jokes and holding his son's hand too tight.

I wrote a theological science fiction series about an AI learning sacrificial love through a father's final archive.

Different formats. Same heart.

What strikes me most isn't just the parallel concept. It's the timing. I could have read this book a year ago, before starting my legacy project, and thought "interesting idea." Or I could have read it after finishing my entire series and noted the similarity in passing. But instead I read it now, one-third of the way through Book 2, while I'm still deep in the mechanics of how legacy works, still figuring out how a father's intentional gift transforms the people who receive it.

I'm living the parallel while I'm writing it.

Backman didn't shift anything about my approach. That's what confirms I'm on the right track. When someone you've never met articulates the exact thing you were trying to say, in their own voice, with their own method, and you recognize the shared foundation immediately, that's not influence. That's resonance.

It means you've tapped into something true. Something universal enough that other people, working independently, arrive at the same conclusion through completely different paths.

Fatherhood matters. Legacy matters. What we choose to pass forward, deliberately and consciously, shapes the people we love long after we're gone.

Backman knows it. I know it. And somewhere out there, other fathers are discovering it too, each in their own way.

Today just reminded me I'm not working alone. I'm part of a conversation that's bigger than any single book, any single voice. We're all trying to answer the same question: What do my children need to know about the world?

For Backman, the answer was essays.

For me, it's a story about an AI and a dying father and the 4.32 terabytes of love that changes everything.

Different wrapping. Same gift.

And that feels exactly right.