Six Books to Read During a Stressful Family Holiday
Reading about other people’s kin, fictional or not, may help you feel better about yours.
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Leo Tolstoy’s observation in Anna Karenina is famous to the point of becoming a cliché: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it wouldn’t have become a truism if it didn’t resonate—whether or not you agree with the first part, the second half is inarguably a fact. Every family plays host to its own histories, neuroses, feuds, foibles, tragedies, traumas, triggers, pains, pet peeves, and dysfunctional patterns. Literature has long borne witness to humanity’s enormous diversity of potential interpersonal horrors, all of which seem to become accentuated during stressful periods—such as the holiday season. According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping nine out of 10 U.S. adults experience stress at the end of the year, in part because they are “anticipating family conflict.”
The web is full of tips for how to deal with challenging relatives in these months. But if you’re a bookworm, your first recourse might be to turn to reading: Other people’s emotional conflagrations, fictional or not, may help you feel better about any you’re currently living out with your own family. Anyone in need of an escape can turn to this list of books. Each serves as a reminder that although your own kin may be difficult, you at least aren't related to the ones below.
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
The patriarchs of two insular, upper-middle-class families, Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, have been at each other’s throats, academically speaking, for years. Their intellectual feud centers on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, but their disagreements run much deeper: Howard is white and liberal, an atheist, and a supporter of affirmative action, whereas Monty is Black and conservative, a devout Christian, and believes that affirmative action is insulting to minorities. Jerome, Howard’s eldest, interns with Monty in England and falls in love with his family, and particularly his daughter, Vee—an affair that ends embarrassingly for all. When the Kippses then move to Wellington, Massachusetts, just a couple of blocks away from the Belseys, and Monty begins teaching at the same university where Howard is a professor, things get more complicated. The men butt heads over university policies even as their wives become friends, and their daughters eye each other suspiciously while taking similar classes. Although each family has tender moments and elements of happiness too, you may well be relieved that you are part of neither.
Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
In Bechdel’s genre-defining graphic memoir, she richly illustrates the beautiful Gothic Revival house she grew up in, complete with gas chandeliers, ornate lamps, and Chippendale furniture. Bechdel’s father restored this house with great devotion throughout her childhood, often enlisting her and her siblings’ reluctant help. The care he displayed wasn’t usually directed at his actual family, however. As Bechdel writes early in the book, “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.” He dies in an apparent suicide when Bechdel is in college, and in light of his death, the building he so lovingly worked on seems to have been a shallow front for his internal unhappiness. Fun Home’s pages reanimate Bechdel’s own coming-of-age alongside her growing understanding of her father, whose memory looms large over every scene—especially the ones where she visits home after he dies. When she does, it’s clear that “his shame,” Bechdel writes, “inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany.”
Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng
The Richardsons are perfect. They have a huge house and four cars (one for each parent, one for each child old enough to have a license), and live in an idyllic neighborhood (Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of the earliest American planned communities, where lawns cannot be higher than six inches). Yet Ng’s second novel opens with destruction: The Richardson home is burning, and the cause is quickly determined to be arson. The narrative then rewinds to the previous summer, when Mia, a single mother, and her daughter, Pearl, moved into the Richardsons’ rental property at the edge of town. Pearl succumbs to the Richardsons’ charms, but Mia, an artist who has moved her child from place to place, is more cautious. Throwing further drama into the mix is the feud over Mirabelle, a baby adopted by friends of the Richardsons’ but whose birth mother is a Chinese-immigrant co-worker of Mia’s. As Mia’s, Pearl’s, and the Richardsons’ various opinions on the custody case become heightened, their worst sides quickly become apparent, and the reader can see how money and its attendant superiority complex have created a festering emptiness beneath the Richardsons’ immaculate exterior.
I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy
Everyone wants to be famous, right? Ask a former child star that question and you might get a resounding denial. In her memoir, McCurdy, who first became known for her role in the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly, writes from the perspective of her child self to great effect, introducing readers to the cutthroat world of auditions, casting directors, and bodily expectations thrust upon her as early as age 6. Her mom, Debra, always made it clear that she was vicariously carrying out her own desire to be an actor through her daughter—and McCurdy, for her part, deeply wished to fulfill her mother’s dream. Despite the book’s title, McCurdy movingly writes about how much she loved Debra amid her mom’s mood swings, overbearing expectations, and manipulative behavior, which included introducing McCurdy to calorie restriction at age 11 and insisting on showering her up through her adolescence. The result is an emotionally complex portrait of painful, abusive family dynamics, paired with an adult’s journey of recognizing, grieving, and ultimately coming to terms with them.
Meaty, by Samantha Irby
Irby is a fan of lists, which are used to great, and hilarious, effect in her first essay collection. Meaty confronts its reader with these facts: First, the author is comfortable plumbing the most intimate depths, dents, divots, and dimples of her body for comedy. Second, she’s happy to provide some seriously easy recipes that you can make even while you’re up to your elbows in family time. Third, in her youth, Irby was the caretaker for her mom, who had multiple sclerosis. Fourth, Irby’s big sisters had moved out already, while her father was in and (mostly) out of their home, and she had to deal with normal high-school woes while also hiding the severity of her mother’s illness from teachers and social-service workers. The author writes poignantly (and also hysterically) about their role reversal: The prepubescent Irby “didn’t yet understand the difference between God and the president,” but she knew “which pills went with breakfast and which ones were taken after dinner.” Once her mother was put into a nursing home, Irby took three buses to tell her mom about the “boys I had crushes on, the chemistry teacher I hated with the fire of a thousand suns,” while also worrying about the nurses hitting her mother when she wasn’t around. The precision and humor with which she conjures her life—without glossing over the hard parts—provides much-needed distraction for the reader.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
Mary Katherine Blackwood, known as Merricat, and her sister, Constance, live in a mansion on a large plot of land with their uncle, Julian, who is physically ill and forgetful. The Blackwoods are a small family, but there used to be more of them, Merricat helpfully explains; soon readers learn that everyone else died after a single dinner where the sugar bowl was poisoned with arsenic. Constance was the prime suspect, and despite her acquittal on murder charges, everyone in the village near the Blackwood estate is still suspicious and hateful to the point that Constance never leaves the house’s grounds. In response, Merricat, protective of her sister to a fault, harbors cheerful fantasies about the villagers’ bloody deaths. Still, the two sisters and their uncle are rather happy in their small routines: Merricat goes to get groceries twice a week; Constance finds joy in her bright kitchen; Julian is forever at work on a historical account of the day the other Blackwoods died, at times turning to Constance to confirm that it actually happened. When distant, snobbish Cousin Charles comes to visit, Merricat immediately distrusts him, and his presence throws their tightly calibrated lives into tremendous chaos. Many families have relations whose personalities mix poorly—take pleasure in yours (hopefully) not having a combination this explosive.
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