88 books like Ordinary People

This novel gets a bad rap, but I found it quite funny. If you have personally struggled with a mental health disorder, then I think it is easy and rewarding to find the humor in it. Perhaps my favorite moment is when Esther Greenwood is wandering around her house with a string following behind her like a cat’s tail.

It is the contrast of absolute darkness and humorous light that makes this one so hopeful to me. Yet, it never dismisses the stark reality of Esther’s condition. Both are present. 

This book is about the most horrifying loss imaginable: the author loses her parents, her husband, and her two young sons all at once, in the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the day after Christmas, 2004. She and her family were spending the holiday in Sri Lanka when the wave hit and overtook the jeep in which they were attempting to flee. I can’t come up with a better justification for suicide than this—she’s lost everyone; she wonders why she was spared, just to suffer these losses every minute of every hour of every day. The book is both a horror story and a testament to human strength. I assure you, you won’t be able to put it down. 

Foley depicts a struggle of finding oneself and learning where one belongs, and holding onto the everchanging definition especially when the geography surrounding us suddenly changes. Maggie and her family migrate from Chicago to Ireland, leaving behind her favorite uncle, and musical influence, the wayward Kevin. Add to this the backdrop of the anticipation of attending a Nirvana concert and you have all the fixings for a well-rounded tale of love, loss, and living. Having had the pleasure of meeting Foley a time or two, I can attest that her sense of setting is as apparent in her identity as an Irish Chicago resident as ever, and this comes through in her characters, who illustrate the same.

Whenever I feel trapped, I think about this book. Told in the first person, it brought me into the asylum and locked me in there with the other patients, and even once I finished reading it, I didn’t feel completely free.

There’s something I like to call “Hollywood Mental Illness.” Movies tend to sugarcoat mental disorders and make them seem fun and entertaining. This book does nothing of the sort. I felt the isolation, the fear, and the sheer panic that these characters faced, like a huge, heavy ball in the pit of my stomach and a zigzagging anxiety that repeatedly paced across my mind. What makes it so dark and frightening is that it’s routed in so much truth, which makes it such a compelling story.

Perhaps the most classic work of horror fiction in both literature and cinema. As an English teacher, I find that there is so much fodder for lessons prevalent in this book–nature vs nurture, the dangers of forbidden knowledge and playing God, the arrogance of science, and who the real monster is. I particularly love the difference between The Monster in the novel and the film, its articulation, desires, abilities, and even its physical appearance. Few written works have been more seminal.

I am recommending this work of fiction selected by The Compassionate Friends Sibling Grief Book Club. Ann, with grace, handles not only the sibling loss of a brother, a boy the sole survivor of a plane crash, but the depth and breadth of grief from the aunt and uncle Edward lives with. Edward’s aunt grieving the loss of an unborn child and her sister, says to Edward, “You’re not okay. We are not okay. This is not okay.” I’m certain other bereaved siblings can relate, “he mourns what his brother has lost.” I related to how in a family we handle grief differently and often are unable to communicate how we are feeling. 

I’m fascinated by the in-depth character development and details in this book. The film is a classic, but I think the book is even better. Many people think of Hannibal Lecter as the obvious villain of Silence of the Lambs, forgetting that Clarice and the FBI were seeking his guidance to find “Buffalo Bill,” a fictional serial killer attacking women.

Buffalo Bill is an amalgamation of real serial killers, including Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Gary Heidnik. By cherry-picking the methods and traits of real killers, I think Harris created a truly terrifying villain. I find the characters, and especially the villain, to be rooted in reality, making them stick in your mind long after the last page.

So what if his worldview never makes sense to anyone but himself? I see Holden Caulfield as the quintessential benchmark for a bad boy, shucking off the last few days at the boarding school that expelled him to wander around Manhattan in a daze. Some readers don’t like him so much that they are personally invested in attacking him and what he represents. 

But what is it that he represents, exactly? When I look beyond the surface of his false bravado, he’s a character deeply affected by the death of his brother and is setting out on a quest to understand how to be a real person in a world of phonies. Many of us, as teenagers, also have moments of feeling misunderstood and alone. I know I did, and so did Holden. 

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.

Jessica Warman’s Between is a marvelous study in flawed characters, who, by their very nature, are at times unlikeable. Ironically, I love unlikeable characters—because they’re written realistically and with plenty of potential for growth. Because I prefer to write characters with realistic attributes, and those in my own book are no exception, I love reading their points of view. Additionally, it’s always interesting when these characters are dropped into situations requiring suspension of disbelief, and it’s even better when protagonists lead a cast of such characters. Between checks all of these boxes. It’s delicious!