Author Tolani Akinola’s 10 Best Books About Dysfunctional Families
Messy families are commonplace, but the parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles in these books are drawn with such specificity and strangeness that they’ll lodge themselves permanently in your mind.
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It was actually by accident that I wrote a novel about family. When I sat down to type out the first few pages of my novel, Leave Your Mess at Home, which published on April 14, I'd been intending to write a kind of anti-romance novel, something like a great unrequited love story that would explore all the reasons why romantic love in its modern iteration seems more like a rare feat than it does a commonplace occurrence. But from the very beginning, I quickly lost interest in the assignment I'd given myself. Hoping to fully realize my novel's protagonist and understand her particular way of loving, I would need to know who her family had been to her. Her siblings each occurred to me as fascinating people, some of them jostling for my attention, while others offered quiet but undeniable assertions that they, too, had testimony about this business of learning to love. Their personalities and voices each came to me with distinction, as did their various conflicts, leading me to wonder what kind of home had produced four children who were each so… aggy and who collectively struggled to find safe harbor in one another.
The American Psychological Association defines a dysfunctional family as one in which "relationships or communication are impaired, and members are unable to attain closeness and self-expression." By that definition, the Longe family begins the novel in a most dysfunctional state of affairs. One sibling is the scapegoat, the other a golden child, another a people pleaser and the youngest a lost child. Foisted into these archetypal roles, they each struggle to identify what they want, who they are and who they might want to be to one another. They share, of course, some particularities, like being second-generation Nigerian immigrants from a working-class background, as well as wrestling with sometimes conflicting cultural expectations. They also all happen to share, in the two months in which we meet them, issues with loving. Messy families are commonplace, some might even say ubiquitous, so what does it take to make one stick with a reader?
As I look back on my journey in crafting this novel, I'm excited to reflect on the many books that taught me something about how to make a messy family compelling. Some of these books I read before I had any inkling about the specific family that makes up Leave Your Mess at Home. Others I read well after I had finished my novel. But each of them provided a needed education in how family creates our personhood, how it can be a unit of belonging or a unit of unbelonging, how it can be a shelter from the oppressive systems in the world outside the home or reify them within the home. Writing can be such isolating work, and I'm grateful to have had these books to turn to as a comfort, and a nod of affirmation, along the way.
Must-read books about messy families
- On Beauty by Zadie Smith
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Real Americans by Rachel Khong
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
- My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
- Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
- Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
All is not well with the Belsey household, but everything was well with me as I laughed my way through On Beauty's pages. This family is charmingly dysfunctional. For starters, they have a rival family. I don't know very many families with actual rivals, but Howard Belsey, the father and philandering husband, has one and expects his family to honor the line of demarcation drawn between them. They, of course, do not. His arch-nemesis, Monty Kipps, is an academic like himself, though unlike himself, Kipps is dapper, Black, conservative and religious. Kipps' views on art and the university's function have plagued Howard for years. Howard is a devoted liberal whose non-religious household and interracial marriage are meant to be an extension of his commitment to inclusivity, although he is a walking contradiction, stonewalling his eldest son for becoming a Christian and shirking accountability for his own infidelity to his wife. The line between the Belseys and the Kipps has already been crossed before the novel begins, but choice and circumstance continue to bring these families into a series of discomfiting confrontations. The children in both families stumble along the way, but the Belsey children shine, of course, as they navigate what it means to be Black in America, should your experience belie dominant narratives about Blackness, as well as the tension between pleasing your parents or becoming who you want to be.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- "When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation."
East of Eden came to me in my early twenties, when I was just beginning to examine the subtle and overt ways my upbringing had shaped my worldview and sense of self. It wasn't my first Steinbeck, but it was the Steinbeck that entrenched him as one of my favorite writers. East of Eden draws upon the biblical story of Cain and Abel to paint a multigenerational family portrait that examines what we inherit and what we choose. The novel scandalizes well beyond its biblical basis. The Trask family's dysfunction is a Jerry-Springer-worthy cocktail of sibling rivalry and fratricide (obviously), attempted filicide, a failed abortion attempt, parental neglect and abandonment and "you are not the father" intra-familial adultery. Amidst it all, the Trask family's last generation of sons wrestles with questions of who they will choose to become, whether they are doomed to live out the flaws of the preceding generation and whether it is braver to face your parents' glaring flaws head-on or to look away. When I crafted my debut novel, I tried to follow Steinbeck's lead in developing family members who, at times, choose willful ignorance, revealing the cost of idolizing someone so deeply that you fail to see their flaws.
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
I read Real Americans in the very late stages of my novel's journey to publication and could not put it down. Khong deftly traverses three generations of a Chinese American family, moving back and forth in time and place to tell the story of a mother's betrayal that ripples across generations and yields multiple estrangements. When this mother's love for her daughter manifests as a desire for control so great as to determine her daughter's life (read: gene expression), however significant the mother's sacrifices have been, it does call that love into question. Around this throughline swarm questions about class and race in America, whether the function of the family unit within our hypercapitalist American society is to equip its children to climb their way into the upper (read: white, wealthy) echelons of the social ladder, or to protect them from the callous inhumanity of the powers that be. Khong's work reminded me of the ever-necessary work of examining the societal values that families sometimes unquestioningly inculcate into their children, and as a minoritized person, how having an uncritical perspective about racial whiteness can also pave the way to an internalized sense of inferiority.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- "This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt."
When a friend I admire recommended Arundhati Roy's debut novel, I didn't hesitate to pick up a copy. I was so glad I did. The God of Small Things does plot like nothing else I've read before. Moving back and forth in time, the novel follows a pair of boy-girl twins through something like a concentric narration revolving around a tragic event in their family's history that changed the trajectory of the twins' lives. We only fully come to understand it at the very end, but on the way, we see the world through the eyes of this pair, gaining access to their inner worlds (largely disregarded by the adults in their lives), as they witness familial fracture, abuse, casteism and political tension within this postcolonial Indian setting. The world outside their home is rife with danger, and the twins definitely don't go unscathed, but the domestic setting also supplies plenty of harm of its own. Roy's gorgeous prose almost distracts from the visceral horror detailed here, but it becomes very clear in describing how family can be the site of our most profound love while also inflicting our most profound pain.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- "You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down."
I don't remember when I first read Song of Solomon, and I honestly cannot say that I fully grasped what it meant—Morrison's work is too masterful to be made clear after a single read—but Sigrid Nunez wrote that we remember how books make us feel, and Song of Solomon made me feel like I was flying, too. The novel follows one Milkman Dead on his journey to reclaim a self liberated from all the stuff, all the morass weighing him down from the surrounding world. Much of that stuff is societal and familial; it's about patriarchal values, generational trauma, racism, sexism and classism. We see how the person Milkman is—uncaring, unbothered by the suffering around him—has been made and constructed by a mother's overwhelming and uncritical love (and excessive breastfeeding), a father's abuse and unrepentant greed and a sister's obligation to provide care. The Dead family is as dysfunctional as they come, and though Milkman is part of the problem himself, we see how his full humanity is stifled by the familial ties that bind. Reading Song of Solomon made me think about how family makes us and what about ourselves might need to be unmade in the process of trying to become who we want to be.
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
I read Escoffery's linked short story collection on a long flight and devoured its pages, refusing myself sleep. Give me heartbreaking and hilarious, and I'm sat with rapt attention. The collection follows a family of Jamaican immigrants and their children, who've settled in Miami after fleeing political instability in their home country. Most of the stories are from the perspective of Trelawney, the family's sensitive younger son, who finds himself caught between not being Black enough to be Black in America and not being Jamaican enough to be considered Jamaican there. Like many, I immediately related to this genre of second-gen angst. But as Trelawney wrestles with feeling "other" in school and college in the Midwest, navigates the brutal labor market post the '08 economic crash and struggles to find a sense of home, family tensions background (and at times foreground) it all. His hard-working, blue-collar father has no time for Trelawney's interest in books and literature, instead showing unabashed favor to Trelawney's older brother, Delano, who takes after him. An affair splits their parents apart, and after they divorce, his father takes Delano and leaves Trelawney behind with his mother. Later, she moves back to Jamaica, leaving Trelawney adrift. At times, we get a window into Trelawney's extended family and their dynamics as well, and I can wholeheartedly avow that nothing in literature has ever broken my heart like what happens to Cukie in "Splashdown." Escoffery's collection is a welcome reminder of what a fragile thing family is, easily succumbing under the weight of greater societal forces like immigration, cultural alienation and economic downturns, and that perhaps, should we find our families broken, we ought to give ourselves some grace.
My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
The title of this one says it all. My sister recommended Braithwaite's sensational debut to me, and like many readers, this novel immediately had me in a chokehold. If we lived in a world where helping your younger sister efficiently dispose of evidence of the boyfriends she has killed was considered laudable behavior, this sister bond might be seen as a highly functional one (especially given the fact that even after three murders, Ayoola and Korede have never been caught). But even in the world of this novel, as we traverse domestic and work settings in a Lagos riddled with misogyny and corruption, things are very amiss. Still, the sisters make a remarkable codependent duo; Ayoola, the younger sister and murderess, is a staggering beauty who can't help but draw unsuspecting men into her web and who also relies on the older, capable and over-responsible Korede to clean up her mess. The novel is a gripping examination of an enduring sibling bond, asking how much loyalty to your sister is too much, even if you've had a firsthand look at the abusive experiences that have shaped her.
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
- "I was not sorry when my brother died."
With a first line like that, Dangarembga's 1988 novel goes for the jugular and does not miss. Tambudzai, the novel's protagonist, introduces us to a postcolonial Rhodesia in which the center does not hold, in which the very nature of family buckles under the weight of colonial influence. At the beginning of the novel, Tambu is resentful of her older brother's privileged position in the family; while she is further committed to the grueling physical labor of rural village life, her elder brother is effectively adopted by their uncle, a prominent, western-educated scholar and headmaster of the mission school in town. Her brother berates Tambu and lauds his privileged position above her, so when he passes away unexpectedly, Tambu eagerly accepts his former place in her uncle's household, then sets about dedicating herself to her studies, happy to leave her life in the village behind. But when she arrives in town, the nature of her uncle's home perplexes her. Her cousin, Nyasha, who was sent to England for school, has lost her ability to speak Shona and her sense of cultural identity. Tambu witnesses the tense affairs in this household, observes how her aunt is the main financial provider but cedes power to her husband, how Nyasha's brother Chido benefits from a gendered double standard while Nyasha rails against her father's traditional patriarchal expectations even as she becomes increasingly anxious about the Western influences that have shaped her. Nervous Conditions is a harrowing study of the ways in which colonizing influences break and reshape familial bonds and how the resulting alienation from those closest to us can also mean a loss of self.
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
Very few novels have succeeded in bringing me to tears, but Olga Dies Dreaming was one of them. Olga and Prieto Acevedo are grown, but their mother's childhood abandonment of them in favor of her commitment to liberating her native Puerto Rico from neocolonial corporate actors haunts them throughout the novel. Despite their challenging childhoods—in addition to their mother disappearing, their father dies from AIDS, leaving their grandmother to raise them—both siblings are ostensibly quite successful. Olga's now a wedding planner for the elite; Prieto is a congressman. Yet over the course of the novel, they are increasingly being forced (both due to a natural disaster as well as their continued receipt of intrusive letters from their activist mother, who remains underground but still seeks to guilt-trip them in favor of her cause) to reckon with their allegiances to the pursuit of the American Dream. As the two siblings uncover family secrets and address their shared trauma, it's also beautiful to watch them open up to one another and support one another more fully. Olga Dies Dreaming also shows us that the path to healing familial wounds isn't gatekept by those who have harmed us.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I first read Pride and Prejudice as a teenager and, naturally, I was too wrapped up in the love story between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy to pay much attention to the rest of the Bennet family. But upon my second read, I realized that the messy Bennets had been marinating somewhere in my subconscious mind all along. Riddled with five daughters who have no means of providing for themselves outside of marriage, Mrs. Bennet is eager to see each of her daughters married well. Mr. Bennet seems entirely unbothered about their fates, preferring to immerse himself in books rather than the material concerns of his family's future. The parents' dynamic towards their children and one another is a bewildering mixture of negligent and overbearing, and despite their mother's efforts to meddle, each of the daughters somehow find themselves left to their own devices, navigating a society that neither their dowdy mother nor their nonchalant father seem to understand. As with many dysfunctional families, there are factions. Elizabeth and Jane are the elder sisters with sense and a deeper sense of propriety, Kitty and Lydia are the younger sisters who gallivant about town and form improper romantic liaisons, and Mary is left to her own devices. I wondered about these factions, whether they were actually as intact as they seemed, where subtle resentments brewed between the siblings and even if this is a family I would ever want to be part of (the answer is a resounding no). But Austen has it all work out in the end, begging the question: Is every dysfunctional family actually functional in its own way?
