Families, whether given or chosen, are chimeric creatures. They’re difficult to describe in full, laden with temperaments, textures, and histories. I can’t recall the last time I spoke to someone who described their family as anything other than dysfunctional.
Of course, perspective matters. The story of a family is dictated by whomever undertakes the task of explaining why their family is like that. Depending on who’s asked among my own relatives, my Great-Aunt Cindy is either a heretic or a saint (though we all agree she should stop picking fights online). Even when the Great-Aunt Cindys of our worlds are on their best behavior, other characters emerge with their own brand of trouble, which we—often to our chagrin, sometimes to our delight—must help sort out.
For me, the best family portraits in fiction strike this balance: chaos outpaced by deep-rooted love. Love so big that words must stretch to contain all its particularities. There is sadness and grief because there are always those things, but it’s the love in these novels I remember, and that I hope other readers go looking for.
Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
You are Candelaria, an 86-year-old Guatemalan immigrant living in Boston. You are making tortillas on Christmas Eve when your daughter Lucia calls: Candy, the youngest of your three granddaughters, is in trouble again. But she is not the only one. Your boyfriend Mauricio soon returns home smelling of nothing, a harbinger of the apocalypse to come. You stab him in the gut with your kitchen knife, and the earth begins to tremble. This is the opening scene that launches a romp of a novel, one that follows three generations of women—Candelaria, Lucia, and her daughters, Paola, Bianca, and Candy. Narrated in alternating second-person (Candelaria) and third-person (the granddaughters) perspectives, they grapple with a multitude of crises. Addiction and intergenerational trauma and Latinidad, but also, zombies, a fertility cult, cannibals, and the most persistent of horrors: men. Together, these women endure it all, laughing maniacally along the way.
Worry by Alexandra Tanner
After surviving a suicide attempt, Poppy moves in with her older sister and Worry’s narrator, Jules, a post-MFA writer surviving in Brooklyn through a patchwork of unfulfilling remote jobs. The arrangement is meant to be temporary while Poppy finds her footing in New York and works through her severe anxiety. Instead, Poppy stays. She adopts a three-legged dog named Amy Klobuchar who destroys most everything. Meanwhile Jules loses her job, her humdrum relationship, and all sense of privacy. For comfort, she nosedives into the anti-vaxx vortex of Mormon mommy bloggers, a move paralleled by their toxic mother’s flirtation with pyramid schemes and Jews for Jesus. As the year progresses, Jules and Poppy navigate their claustrophia—physical, emotional—and an ever-growing capitalist hellscape. It’s a wry, funny tailspin that captures the madness specific to sisters.
Leave Your Mess At Home by Tolani Akinola
This debut novel follows four Nigerian-American siblings living in Chicago: Sola, Anjola, Ola, and Karen Longe. Their family relationship is strained due, in large part, to their mother, Latifat, and the pressures and/or leniencies she places on each of them (though their father’s passive tendencies don’t help). The resulting dynamic is—to invoke another popular diagnosis for families—messy. So messy, so heartwrenching, and so funny. Combined, these elements make their siblinghood incredibly vivid. As the novel rotates between the siblings’ perspectives, Akinola reveals layered histories and suppressed secrets that build to an explosive climax at Thanksgiving. The unfolding crisis forces the family into reflection. Some go willingly, while others resist accountability altogether. In the end, the siblings must decide for themselves which relationships are worth fighting for and which are better let go.
Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
From his front porch across the Penobscot river, Charles Lamosway has watched his daughter, Elisabeth, grow up. She is oblivious to their connection. As far as she knows, her father is Roger, the man who raised her. This arrangement was predicated by Charles and Elisabeth’s mother, Mary, to ensure Elisabeth would be raised as a citizen of the Penobscot Nation. If her true parentage were known, she would not meet the tribe’s blood quantum requirement. Charles understands the gravity of this choice, having been raised on the Penobscot reservation for most of his young life by his mother and late stepfather, Frederick. When Charles became a legal adult, he was forced to move across the river, yet his connection to the Penobscot Nation endured. After Frederick’s passing, this connection frayed; when he discovers Elisabeth may have disappeared, it threatens to snap entirely. The fear of losing her spurs him into action, kicking up stones that might be better left unturned. The novel asks us to consider if there is more to belonging than blood, and seems to give its own answer: yes.
Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell
Another tender novel featuring stepfamilies. Zambra is heralded as a writers’ writer; he is interested in writers and writing as subjects of narrative exploration. Chilean Poet fits this paradigm. Set in Santiago, a city of poets, the novel opens with Gonzalo and Carla, the former a fledgling poet, as randy teenaged lovers. They part ways, as teenagers are wont to do, and meet again at a gay bar nine years later. Clothes come off, and Gonzalo notices that Carla bears a curious new scar. Since they last met, she’s had a son, Vicente, now six years old. Slowly, they become a family. Seeing the bond between Vicente and Gonzalo grow—negotiating their new roles as surrogate parent and child, Gonzalo imparting his love of poetry to Vicente—is my favorite part of this novel. Their dynamic is kaleidoscopic: warmhearted, awkward, funny, full of care.
Then, there is a turn. This is Zambra, after all, who delights in chicanery, and poetry is the backdrop. Naturally, a volta is required: Betrayal upends the new family’s happiness, breaking them apart. Readers are left wondering how and if Vicente and Gonzalo will find their way back to one another. Luckily, it’s a joy to find out.
Three Parties by Ziyad Saadi
Firas Dareer is turning twenty-three. The stakes for this particular birthday have been upped: in addition to throwing a blowout bash, Firas will use this day to come out to his entire social circle, including his conservative Muslim parents. The Dareers are Palestinian refugees; they fled Gaza for Detroit after Firas’s grandmother was shot by an Israeli occupation soldier during the Second Intifada. Coming out means risking his family and his only tether to home. Despite a painstaking itinerary, disruptions abound that threaten to implode his special day: his cantankerous Jido, escaped from the nursing home; Maysa, the Dareers’ housekeeper, who constantly meddles with his decor and once caught him blowing another boy at a party; a brigade of neighbors, friends, and secret lovers; his evasive sister, Suhad, and his youngest brother, Mazen, who preoccupies the family’s collective imagination, having recently survived a suicide attempt. As the day unravels, Firas’s party snowballs into much more than a tragicomic birthday celebration; it becomes—without spoiling too much—a sort of homecoming.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
For some friends, I am the only writer they know, which generally means I am also the only reader they know. That means I’m called upon as Book Recommender often, and Girl, Woman, Other is one of my staple suggestions. It’s an immersive book with equal parts seriousness and levity. There is something for everyone here. A novel-in-stories, it offers a window into the lives of 12 Black British women, ages spanning from their teens to well into their nineties. Though not all of the main cast meet on the page, they are almost all interconnected in some way—as mothers, daughters, aunts, mentors, friends, lovers. (For the curious, search engine results will reveal maps hand-drawn by readers who’ve gone through the trouble of sorting all the links.) The novel tackles several thorny topics through an intersectional lens: feminism, immigration, racism, sexuality, class, and gender identity, though these hardly scratch the surface. But the characters are not always victims. In an interview about the novel, Evaristo explained that the inclusion of “Other” in the title refers, yes, to how they’re othered by society, but also sometimes by one another. For me, this book encapsulates the full meaning of family, because it includes community as part of its working definition.
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