100 books like How To Talk To A Widower

This is a peculiar and marvelous book about birth families, adopted families, and “found” families, and how each of these can be equally screwed up.

Starting in Ireland in the 1940s, the story is peppered with sharp, clever dialog and vivid, fully-human characters. I love how the narrator struggles with his own heart for decades, unable to decide what he wants, who he loves, what’s right, what’s wrong, etc.—in other words, all the stuff I haven’t figured out yet myself. 

Coincidence also plays a huge role in this book, basically making an ass of everyone, which I find oddly comforting since it reminds me that part of being human is having very little control over my own life. Painfully funny and brilliant from cover to cover. 

This is a YA novel, but it deals with adult themes like suicide, crumbling families, and mortality. 

It’s also drop-dead funny, with a smartass, teenage narrator you’ll alternately want to hug or slap silly. He believes he’s been abducted by aliens and given the choice of either saving the world or destroying it, and he only has a few months to decide. I love the witty dialog and the genuine, complex relationships, but what especially drew me to this story is the love story between the narrator and his new boyfriend. 

I wish I’d had a book like this to read when I was a teenager struggling with my own sexuality; it would’ve helped me immensely to see a fully-realized gay character like this one, both flawed and lovely, trying to find his place in the world, just like me.

On the surface, this is a coming-of-age story with a protagonist similar to many others in the genre—bright, witty, snobbish, and pissed off at almost everybody he meets. But what makes this book so good is the narrator’s intelligence and self-awareness, and the complexity of all the characters and their relationships. 

My own upbringing was a far cry from the wealthy, highly-cultured world depicted here—I grew up in a tiny town in southern Iowa, and though there was a college in town I had little access to culture—yet I could completely relate to the gay narrator’s fish-out-of-water feeling and his desire to be understood. I also loved his close relationship with his grandmother, since my grandmother was equally important to me.    

This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. It’s about a neurotic, hypochondriacal, middle-aged college professor in a small town who does one absurd thing after another as he attempts to sort his life out. 

His wife, daughter, and father are all as much of a wreck as he is, as are his lunatic colleagues in the English department. Being a middle-aged, neurotic, and hypochondriacal man myself—and having grown up in a small, claustrophobic college town with maladjusted academic types much like these—this novel had me crying with laughter. (There’s an over-the-top scene with a goose and a news reporter that almost made me wet myself.) 

But as often happens in a Richard Russo novel, there are also tons of lovely, sweet, and insightful moments. This is a great book.

This is a very short book with a single brilliant insight into the human condition. 

It shows how wrong it is to suppose (as Marx and Engels did) that first there were self-sufficient nuclear families who then produced surpluses to exchange with other nuclear families. 

Mauss used early fieldwork in the South Pacific and Northwest Coast of Canada, to demonstrate that exchange is the very essence of human social life, inseparable from the incest taboo, marriage rules, and a fully realized highly elaborate symbolic universe based upon principles of animism, sympathetic magic and rites of passage. 

I love this book – Hanawalt’s research is intriguing – using manorial court rolls, coroners’ reports, and wills she reveals the lives of ordinary folk and opened the doors for me to peasant homes in the later Middle Ages. I thoroughly enjoyed her description of everyday life from childhood to old age, the household economy, blood ties, wealth, homesteads, and surrogate parents and children. I discovered that family concerns were not so very different then to ours today and was reminded that the past is not a foreign country where they did things differently. It’s both scholarly and readable, a book to dip into or relish from cover to cover, another essential for writing historical fiction about the Middle Ages.

Waldman is an expert at her depiction of the complicated mother/daughter relationship. Every interaction between Olivia and Elaine is thick with their history of built-up resentment and guilt, an intense love that can often overwhelm and feel burdensome, the competing desires to please and to hurt complicating every moment.

This novel stayed with me for literally years.

I love a well-told, emotionally complex, family drama set in the burbs (aʹ la John Cheever, Amy Bloom, A.M. Homes, you get the drift).

Setting and gorgeous writing aside, Lily King crawls inside the heart and head of protagonist Daley Amory, a twenty-something who is trying to escape the tyranny of her father’s alcoholism and reinvent a new life for herself.

I rooted hard for her to make this break, to ride off into the sunset, or to enroll at Berkely to study anthropology, and make a life with a great guy.

I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that King writes brilliantly about addiction, family, and the fierce and often futile siren’s call to repair what is broken.  

Yet more dysfunctional families and tormented sibling relationships, but this book is funny as well as clever, and I loved the fractured relationships between Alice and Hanna, twins who have always been saint and sinner. Now the two women are adults, nothing has turned out as they expected in their lives and they struggle with each other as well as with their domineering mother and critical older brother. Some great family tension and well-written dialogue, and despite the subject matter, this isn’t a book that will leave you down-hearted.

These twenty-two, well-crafted flash fiction stories illuminate a wide array of family situations and humanity by exploring both mundane and extraordinary moments. This collection manages to be funny, quirky, and poignant, while examining the foibles of family life and relationships with a particular focus on the roles of women and girls.