The best books about surviving dysfunctional families

I interviewed Doris Lessing about her memoir Alfred & Emily at her home in London in 2008. She was 88 years old, but was still trying to break free of the “monstrous legacy” of World War II, which had left her father, Alfred, broken and her mother, Emily, “demented.”

Growing up in colonial Rhodesia, she was more comfortable in the bush with wild snakes than she was at home with her troubled parents. Yet she acknowledges what they could have been had history not been so cruel. I’ve tried to apply that same grace to my parents, who met during the Vietnam War and later struggled to care for my severely disabled brother.

Acknowledging my parents’ war wounds, as Lessing did with hers, helped pave the way for forgiveness.

My childhood was defined by chaos: My older brother sometimes chased me with knives and darts and my mother was at one point placed in a psychiatric facility.

After I came out as a teenager in the Deep South, school, once a sanctuary, felt like a place of threat. That constant mayhem explains why Running with Scissors spoke to me so strongly.

The narrator first copes with his mother’s psychotic episodes and, after moving in with his psychiatrist, must forge a path without a support system. Burroughs leans on an older teenager named Natalie, illustrating the power of chosen family.

Nigel Slater was already one of the U.K.’s most celebrated chefs when he released his memoir Toast in 2003.

When I read it more than a decade later, it was like diving into a prequel to his many cookbooks, columns, and TV shows that I’d followed for years. The book is hilarious and heartbreaking. It beautifully illustrates how interests and passions can save people from unhappy childhoods and toxic people, like his coarse stepmother and distant father, both of whom are vividly drawn.

As a memoirist, I took inspiration from his narrative arch and how he persevered. The darkness and isolation of my own childhood is what prepared me to embrace the glitz and glamour of Eurovision. 

My therapist once told me that regret is a useless emotion. Rather than regretting the many ways my father and I struggled to connect when he was alive, I should acknowledge the sadness but remember I was acting (and not acting) within a particular set of circumstances.

Out Stealing Horses dives into similarly difficult terrain, where clear-cut answers remain elusive. It follows a man trying to make peace with a father who abandoned him. The understated sorrow of that proves to be as chilling as the Nordic landscape Per Petterson describes.

It’s a haunting testament to the ongoing struggle of making peace with the departed. 

My parents and I struggled to see eye-to-eye on a lot of things—like my American father’s racism and disdain for immigrants, even though my mother was Vietnamese.

My mother joined my father in insisting that I was white rather than multi-racial. Neither could stomach my sexual orientation and they frequently suggested I would inevitably contract AIDS. The mismatch of cultures in our household—from the southern United States to Vietnam, my progressive values pitted against their often backwards thinking—led me to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

She creates a rich mosaic of characters, including an erudite academic and atheist whose children include a would-be street hustler and a religious zealot. The book asks what love means and how tightly it binds a splintered family. Smith does this with laser-sharp observations and overflowing wit, making it a breezy read.