100 books like Priestdaddy

It’s not a “deep cut” by any means, but I had to start this list with this book. It’s the book that made me fall in love with the graphic novel format and remains perhaps my favorite book of all time.

Bechdel weaves together her coming-of-age as a lesbian, her discovery of her father’s homosexuality, and rich literary allusions, all with beautiful, detailed artwork.

When I read this book for the first time as a closeted teenager, I was captivated not only by the queer representation but by the rich storytelling. The way Bechdel’s words and illustrations work together to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of their parts opened my mind to the magic and power of the comic medium. 

Is there no end to my obsession with adolescent friendship? Apparently not.

Adolescence is the moment when everything blossoms, collides, and explodes: Sils and Berie were inseparable and insufferable teenagers together (it’s okay, we all were) and Berie is looking back on the summer they were fifteen from her own flawed marriage years later.

They were just girls: smoking and drinking, leaving each other cottage cheese sandwiches after school, strumming guitars, cracking on Sils’s besotted, lunkhead boyfriend. Then why does it feel like such a lost paradise to Berie and to us? Because this is the moment you feel adult powers awaken, before you grasp the consequences of your power. Because no one is running the frog hospital. Because it’ll never be that vivid again.  

My novel shares a kinship with this book, also set in a Florida theme park—although one less Noah’s ark and a lot more alligators.

The myth of the Bigtree family is a roadside attraction: the family matriarch Hilola Bigtree’s daredevil dive into a pit of gators. The novel begins after Hilola’s death from cancer, and grapples with the dissolution of the family and their loss of purpose with the closure of the park. Ava, Kiwi, and Osceola are all on their own paths through the void their parents left behind.

Russell’s world-building is always top-notch, and here, the siblings must navigate a Bird Man, the World of Darkness, and ghost boyfriends.

I read this book in graduate school at the University of Washington, where Robinson had also been a graduate student. What struck me so forcefully was how the father is killed off in a train wreck at the beginning of the novel to usher in the exploration of the female life of generations of women.

No work before made me see how a male character and tradition can marginalize female life. This novel encouraged me to focus on my mother and sisters in my own writing.

Tolentino’s essay collection is already a contemporary classic. In it, she lays bare—with surgical precision—the illusions and compromises of late-capitalist subjectivity, but pairs that existential dread with a sharp eye for the comic absurdity of it all. It explains so much of our contemporary life, and why that contemporary life so often feels bad. It stayed with me for the clarity of its arguments, but also for a truly hilarious scene involving escaped bodily air and a yoga class. 

I love the boldness of putting “comedy” right there in the subtitle, and Pyae Moe Thet War absolutely delivers. This memoir-in-essays, about being a millennial woman in Myanmar, has one of the strongest voices I’ve encountered in recent essay collections. She writes back against the expectation that racialized and minoritized writers perform their trauma for the reader, or must be restricted to certain topics and tones. You’ve Changed sets a precedent I know other writers will feel empowered to follow.

Whether in her book or her writing for BuzzFeed, Koul’s voice and humor are always instantly recognizable. Their distinctive tone is right there in the title. In her debut collection, Koul explores growing up as a South Asian woman in Canada, braiding her personal narrative with deft cultural critique. Essay collections rarely have such a strong sense of characters as this one does—Koul’s parents, especially, are deeply felt and sharply rendered figures who appear across the essays as sources of humor, pathos, and exasperation.

This novel pulled me in quickly with its portrayal of a middle-class family hoping to spend a relaxing week in a rented home they could never afford to own. The family’s plans go awry quickly when the owners show up at door wanting to stay there as a refuge from the total blackout in NYC. Adding suspense to witty social commentary, Alam creates a sense that something very bad is happening, without ever describing what that bad thing is. I had a few ideas, but the author outsmarted and surprised me with the ending. I feel he captured a lot about modern life and the anxiety many of us feel about the future. Yet, it was entertaining and made me laugh a few times.  

Joshua Mohr should not be alive. Diagnosed young with a medical condition that could kill him any second, the author does what addicts do: continues grinding his own face in the dirt even as he struggles to keep his life together and stop. In vignettes of astonishing violence and poetry, Mohr careens from unspeakable despair to moments of fearless, weirdly laugh-out-loud intensity and beauty—sometimes in the same sentence. All that, and his portrait of San Francisco makes you want to show up, find a dive and bang your head off the floor until you’re healed. Mohr writes with everything on the line. Almost like he’s trying to save his own life as much as yours.

Two reasons I love Richard Pryor’s memoir—his failures and his successes. 1967, Richard Pryor flamed out in front of Dean Martin in Vegas, asking a sold-out crowd: “What the fuck am I doing here?” A year later, scheduled to open for Miles Davis at the Village Gate, a guy pops backstage to say Miles Davis would be opening for him. A gesture of ultimate respect. From boyhood brothel to Sunset Boulevard icon—there is so much heart in this book, so much raw honesty, so many crazy highs and unbelievable bottoms, I feel almost guilty marching out the killer anecdotes: Yes,  Pryor scored weed for Jackie Gleason. Yes, he smuggled dope into Arizona prisoners filming Stir Crazy. But what makes this memoir essential reading is Richard Pryor’s genius. “You all know how Black humor started? It started on slave ships. Cat was rowing and dude says,… show more.