I’ve lived this theme—my father died just before I turned three years old and I’ve been haunted by his death ever since, especially during my growing up. It’s informed everything I’ve ever written, including an essay I wrote for The New York Times Magazine which they ranked in 2017 as one of their 16 all-time best Lives columns.
Judith Guest’s novel about a family who loses their eldest son in a boating accident on Lake Michigan was summer reading for my entire class in high school, but it felt like it was selected just for me. I felt I was Conrad Jarrett, the sensitive depressed outsider kid twisted up in knots over his brother’s death. It’s amazing that Judith Guest could write so convincingly from a male teenager’s point of view. But then she struggled with depression and based this story on something that really happened to a family in suburban Chicago. You can feel the truth of lived experience in this classic tale of grief and growing up, and in Timothy Hutton’s performance in the 1980 movie version.
One of the great bestseller of our time: the novel that inspired Robert Redford's Oscar-winning film starring Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore
In Ordinary People, Judith Guest's remarkable first novel, the Jarrets are a typical American family. Calvin is a determined, successful provider and Beth an organized, efficient wife. They had two sons, Conrad and Buck, but now they have one. In this memorable, moving novel, Judith Guest takes the reader into their lives to share their misunderstandings, pain, and ultimate healing. Ordinary People is an extraordinary novel about an "ordinary" family divided by pain, yet bound by their…
Oddly enough, Salinger’s classic was paired with Ordinary People as summer reading when I was in high school. Like everyone else, I fell in love with Holden Caulfield’s distinctive and disaffected teenage voice, but more than that, I identified with Holden’s survivor guilt. Like Conrad Jarrett in Ordinary People, Holden has lost a brother, and in mourning the loss of his little brother Allie, Holden also mourns for his own lost childhood. I guess that’s why tales of loss and coming-of-age stories go together. Whether or not we’ve experienced a grievous loss, as we grow up, we lose a part of ourselves and our old relationships. Books like Catcher made me realize I wasn’t alone.
Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets, and the prose in her autobiographical novel is almost like a poem. It’s so evocative and layered with naturalistic symbolism. The unforgettable metaphor in the book’s title, The Bell Jar, likens depression to a bell jar that warps what is seen from inside of it. How true that is! 19-year-old protagonist Esther Greenwood is another character I totally identified with, a young person whose struggle to individuate is complicated by loss. Like me, Plath lost her father when she was young and she writes about him eloquently in her poems and in this beautiful novel, her only work of prose fiction.
When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria…
When I was in college, I told my writing teacher I wanted to write about my father’s death, which had happened when I was very little. My teacher, a famous writer, lost his father when he was very little too, but he told me he never wrote about it directly. I looked for examples in literature of someone writing autobiographically about a loss in early childhood and I only ever found one: Tolstoy’s debut novel, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was 2, his father when he was 8, and he writes about it with unparalleled power across his oeuvre, but never so directly and autobiographically as in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. He made it OK for me to write my own autobiographical novel about childhood loss.
Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an 'awkward mixture of fact and fiction', generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person's emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and themes that would come to full flower in the immortal…
I may be the only person who thinks of Frankenstein as a coming-of-age story. But Frankenstein’s monster is in so many ways a child. He may have been constructed from adult body parts, but he experiences the world as if for the first time and looks to Dr. Frankenstein as a parent—a parent who spurns him. References to infancy and parents abound in this novel. Mary Shelley’s mother died in childbirth, leaving her to grow up without a mother. That longing for a missing parent and its warping effects on the child’s emotional life hit me hard in Shelley’s novel. As crazy and fantastical as its story is, Frankenstein captures the loneliness of growing up as well as any coming-of-age novel I’ve read.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
A funny and heart-wrenching tale of two brothers growing up in the shadow of a father who lived a short but heroic life, In the Land of the Living aims to evoke the beauty and tragedy of lived experience in the style of the finest realist literature. It deals with childhood loss in a direct way that most novels don’t, but like other coming-of-age tales that feature loss, it’s also about the loss that everyone experiences in growing up—the loss of childhood innocence.
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will they destroy each other? And more importantly, how will humans tolerate their own creations, the robots, on this planet?
In this, his latest speculative fiction novel, Shane Joseph, returns to the “what if” questions facing humanity that he raised in After the Flood, a book that won him the…
With Chatbots and Large Language Models changing the world of writing and publishing dramatically, what happens when we introduce a sentient robot capable of feelings into the mix?
Phil Kruger, inventor, and serial womanizer, believes he has the answer in his creation, Victoria, the first sentient robot in the world, imbued with beauty, knowledge, and strength and on a crash course to acquire human feelings through massive infusions of data. Arrayed against him are independent trade publisher Artemius (Art) Jones and his rebellious and sexually starved daughter, Paula, an editor herself, who is determined to take her father's failing press,…
