Most family drama is juicy – think about the popularity of TV shows like “Succession” or “The Sopranos,” or the staying power of movies like 1998’s “The Parent Trap.”
But family dynamics don’t just play out on the screen. They’ve long been fodder for novelists and non-fiction writers, too.
“ I think we love reading about other people’s families because we only know what’s going on in ours, and there’s a little bit of competition of, ‘My family is maybe better or worse than yours,’” Traci Thomas, host and creator of “The Stacks” podcast, said. “But I think there’s also solace in knowing that you are not the only one who’s going through something with your mom or your cousin or your uncle.”
Book recommendations from Traci Thomas
Fiction
- “Yolk” by Mary H. K. Choi
“ It’s Jane and June, and they are 20-somethings living in New York. They grew up being very close, but by the time they got to New York, they sort of have big differences. June is the type-A older sister: first-born, got a finance job, the whole thing.
“Jane is the one who’s still in college, not really doing her homework. But then June gets cancer, and because Jane is in college, she’s got healthcare. And so it becomes this conversation about what can Jane do to help her sister? There might be some fraud coming up. That’s an idea they have, but it’s also just about these two young women navigating family and each other in a really beautiful and moving way.”
- “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett
“ This is historical fiction. It starts in the Deep South in the 1950s. It fast forwards to the 1990s. They’re identical twin sisters who are Black. They are both able to pass as white. One chooses to pass as white. The other one chooses to live as a Black woman in the South with her daughter, who is visibly Black.
“It’s about them having separated from each other and living these two separate lives, and then how their lives come back together. And it’s, again, another really beautiful and interesting conversation about sisters and growing apart.”
- “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan
“ It’s one of the great books on mothers and daughters because it is funny and tender, and it kind of shows the ways that parents try to shield their lives from their children and the ways that children always end up finding out something, or the way that children know. I love this idea of sort of protection because the daughters are trying to protect the moms from themselves and each other.
“ She also does such a great job of tapping into the competition. It’s like you can hate your mom or you can hate your daughter, but if someone else hates them, it’s a fight. And she taps so well into this sort of shifting allegiances and alliances within families and within friend groups. And I think that is also something that makes the book so special and so human.”
- “Home Fire” by Kamila Shamsie
- “Red at the Bone” by Jacqueline Woodson
- “Detransition, Baby” by Torrey Peters
- “Tar Baby” by Toni Morrison
- “Oye” by Melissa Mogollon
- “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen
- “The Safekeep” by Yael Van Der Wouden
Nonfiction
- “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family” by Jesselyn Cook
“ It feels very much on the nose of what a lot of people are experiencing in their families, where there might be family members who are having different political opinions, or you feel like your family member one way or the other has sort of gone off the deep end, and they’re unreachable.
“This book follows different families who have family members who have joined QAnon. And it kind of shows how they got there and the ways that families are trying to kind of get their family members back.
“So it’s political, but also it’s really about connection and what we lose and what we gain from online communities and how that can impact our real-life relationships.”
- “Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir” by Rebecca Carroll
“ Rebecca Carroll was adopted at birth by two white parents, and she was sort of taught this idyllic, colorblind world. And then eventually she meets her birth mother, who’s a white woman who sort of has a lot of opinions and thoughts about race, and there’s this tension and this rivalry between Rebecca and her birth mother, and then also what her adoptive parents had taught her.
“She has to confront race and family and parenting, and it kind of drives her towards depression and unhealthy lifestyle until she works through it. It’s just a really powerful investigation of what it means to be in a family, what it means to be loved, and what it means to have your own identity.”
Click here for host Robin Young’s conversation with Rebecca Carroll
- “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel
“ It’s about Alison Bechdel as a child. Her dad is the director of the town funeral home, which is what they call the ‘Fun Home.’ So that’s where the book gets its title.
“Alison goes to college. She comes out as a lesbian, and then, in that process, realizes, ‘Oh, my dad is actually gay.’ And so the book is sort of investigating that. I won’t give other pieces away, though. I think it’s public knowledge what happened, but it’s this exploration of her childhood and looking back and looking for clues of what’s going on, and it’s really, really great.”
- “Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family” by Robert Kolker
- “Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood” by Trevor Noah
- “I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Jennette McCurdy
- “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty” by Patrick Radden Keefe
- “All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir” by Nicole Chung
- “The Light of the World: A Memoir” by Elizabeth Alexander
- “They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies that Raised Us” by Prachi Gupta
- “Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice” by Cristina Rivera Garza
- “Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed” by Maureen Callahan
- “A Better Ending: A Brother’s Twenty Year Quest to Uncover the Truth About His Sister’s Death” by James Whitfield Thomson
- “Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir” by Tessa Hulls
- “Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations” by Mira Jacob
- “The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir” by Thi Bui
____
Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR