Here are 100 books that When Did You Last See Your Father? fans have personally recommended if you like
When Did You Last See Your Father?.
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Out of all the flattering reviews of my books, my favourite is of a reader choking on her lunch. My book was about death. The reader, who survived, said it made her laugh so hard. I write about tough times by bringing out the it’s okay to smile now bits. The Midnight Years is about teen mental health, Happily Never After is about loneliness, and Flyaway Boy is about stereotyping. Making people laugh through tears is a tough task. Here are some books that cracked it.
Fun home is what the author and her family call the funeral home they were raised in. I was drawn into this graphic memoir of the author’s relationship with her father, with disturbing themes of suicide, unaccepted gender identities, and domestic abuse.
The story manages to stay buoyant despite it all, and the observations are funny. The author’s ability to capture her most painful memories in bright light and intricate detail catapulted this read to the top for me.
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical.
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is…
I have been writing books for a while (don’t make me tell you how long), but mostly novels, and mostly not with dads in them. This finally changed around the time my own lovable, unusual dad died in 2018. I knew I had to write about him and figured I would do this in fiction. But when I really dug into the family secrets my dad kept—and discovered details he didn’t know himself until his last years—I knew I’d need to turn to writing a memoir instead. That got me reading and rereading about all the other vivid, maddening dads who were waiting there on my shelves.
That’s right—Charles Dickens! I laughed, I cried, I stomped my feet.
I’ve been in a Dickens reading group since the pandemic and am constantly amazed by how funny he is. His scenes are so colorful and alive that they play like brilliant movies in your brain. In other works, Dickens has some saccharine father-daughter pairs who can induce an eye roll, but in this book his bone-chilling father made me sit up.
The icy-hearted Paul Dombey dotes on his sweet but feeble young son while completely ignoring his adorable and kind little daughter, who barely gets any scraps of his affection. We daughters read on, waiting for the Scrooge-like Dombey to learn his lesson over the course of the novel. Don’t ignore your daughters, dammit!—Oh, did I say that aloud?
'There's no writing against such power as this - one has no chance' William Makepeace Thackeray
A compelling depiction of a man imprisoned by his own pride, Dombey and Son explores the devastating effects of emotional deprivation on a dysfunctional family. Paul Dombey runs his household as he runs his business: coldly, calculatingly and commercially. The only person he cares for is his little son, while his motherless daughter Florence is merely a 'base coin that couldn't be invested'. As Dombey's callousness extends to others, including his defiant second wife Edith, he sows the seeds of his own destruction.
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
I read this book long before Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was the first of her books that I read, and I was so seized by her style of narration that I proceeded to read with devotion everything she had written.
In one of the early pages of this book, Ernaux declares that in writing about her father, she didn’t want falsity or an overblown style, no artsy attempt to produce something “’ moving’ or ‘gripping.’” The style she followed was true to the life she was describing as a working-class man with minimum education. Here is a book that pays tribute to life but also enacts a credo for what Ernaux calls a “neutral way of writing”: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony.”
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.
Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family…
I have been writing books for a while (don’t make me tell you how long), but mostly novels, and mostly not with dads in them. This finally changed around the time my own lovable, unusual dad died in 2018. I knew I had to write about him and figured I would do this in fiction. But when I really dug into the family secrets my dad kept—and discovered details he didn’t know himself until his last years—I knew I’d need to turn to writing a memoir instead. That got me reading and rereading about all the other vivid, maddening dads who were waiting there on my shelves.
With Laura Warrell’s lyrical book, I discovered a different sort of narcissist dad—the musician kind! Also, the womanizer kind.
I don’t know much about jazz, but you don’t need to know about it to get swept up in Warrell’s story of a trumpeter with the great name Circus Palmer and the female players around him, including his yearning daughter Koko. I admire how Warrell brings you close to Circus and the many women characters: this is no simple story about a man ignoring or abandoning his loved ones.
Circus comes to life, you can almost hear him play, and the novel leaves you with the awareness that a young woman can love and be shaped by a dad, even an absent, maddening one—and even that relation can have a sweet melody.
GMA BUZZ PICK • How do we find belonging when love is unrequited? A "gorgeously written debut" (Celeste Ng, best-selling author of Little Fires Everywhere) filled with jazz and soul, about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, told by the women who love Circus Palmer—trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man—as they ultimately discover the power of their own voices.
“Elegant, unexpected and…unforgettable.” —New York Times Book Review
“A modern masterpiece.” —Jason Reynolds, best-selling author of Look Both Ways
It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be…
I have been writing books for a while (don’t make me tell you how long), but mostly novels, and mostly not with dads in them. This finally changed around the time my own lovable, unusual dad died in 2018. I knew I had to write about him and figured I would do this in fiction. But when I really dug into the family secrets my dad kept—and discovered details he didn’t know himself until his last years—I knew I’d need to turn to writing a memoir instead. That got me reading and rereading about all the other vivid, maddening dads who were waiting there on my shelves.
I read two great memoirs for a panel I moderated about daughters and fathers. At the event, I enjoyed watching Leslie Absher and Leta McCollough Seletzky meet and realize how much they had in common.
Both authors had dads who kept secrets— big, political secrets. Leta Seletzky’s dad worked as an undercover officer for the Memphis Police Department in the 1960s: he was “The Kneeling Man” in the famous photograph taken after King’s death.
This may sound odd, but I related to Leta Seletzky’s emotional tale of how she gradually got to know her father, as an adult, by uncovering the many layers of his life story.
The intimate and heartbreaking story of a Black undercover police officer who famously kneeled by the assassinated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr--and a daughter's quest for the truth about her father
In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel.
This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the…
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
A writer’s book about a writer-father. In this remarkable memoir, Amis pays tribute to Kingsley Martin. The book is truthful about the anxiety of influence and about the collision of ambition, the competitiveness between writers, even when they happen to be father and son.
What made the book touching was Martin Amis’s love and sorrow not only for Kingsley Martin, his biological father but also for his literary father, the novelist Saul Bellow. Bonus: Amis’s probing, ruthless, but always burnished sentences: “The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite.”
The author traces his life and career, examining his relationship with his father, comic novelist Kingsley Amis, and the changing literary scene in Great Britain and the United States.
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
When Susan Cheever was a young journalist, her father, the novelist and short-story writer, John Cheever, would often say to her that she ought to put her experiences down on paper. “I write to make sense of my life,” the father said to his daughter to explain why he kept a journal.
This book is Susan Cheever’s attempt to make sense of her father’s life: his decline and dissolution, especially owing to his alcoholism, and his struggle as a writer to nevertheless find coherence and control in life through the exercise of his art.
The late writer's eldest child draws on her father's journals and letters and on her own memories to construct a sympathetic, insightful account of Cheever's life, career, literary relationships, problems, and family life
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.
The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”
An “extraordinary rich correspondence” (The New York Times Book Review) between a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer at Oxford who would go on to become a Nobel Prize winning author and his sacrificing, beloved father.
At seventeen, V.S. Naipaul wanted to "follow no other profession" but writing. Awarded a scholarship by the Trinidadian government, he set out to attend Oxford, where he encountered a vastly different world from the one he yearned to leave behind. Separated from his family by continents, and grappling with depression, financial strain, loneliness, and dislocation, "Vido" bridged the distance with a faithful correspondence that began shortly before…
I am a historian of sexuality who is fascinated by unknown stories that reveal the past to be way more complicated than we expect. I’ve written about same-sex marriage in early America, a teenage female poet of the American Revolution, a masculine woman who founded her own college, and a notorious British pederast. Now I’m working on the tale of a forgotten American sexual adventuress and jewel thief. I also have a longstanding research project about the history of food and sex from the eighteenth century to the present day.
In my secret heart of hearts, I wrote my most recent book, Unspeakable, for an audience of one: Janet Malcolm. All her prose is sharp, but her anti-biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is spectacular in its exploration of the question: is it even possible to write a truthful biography?
Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide?
In The Silent Woman, renowned writer Janet Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, to discover how Plath became an enigma in literary history.
The Silent Woman is a brilliant, elegantly reasoned inquiry into the nature of biography, dispelling our innocence as readers, as well as shedding a light onto why Plath's legend continues to exert such a hold on our imaginations.
I’ve been a life writer since I kept my first Mary Quant, Daisy diary in 1973. Reading and writing memoir, I’ve written thirty as a ghostwriter in the last six years and am working on my own. I’m fascinated by life stories. After an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, I won the Wasafiri Life Writing Prize, which led to a novel in biographical form, based on the life of my nan in the last century, Girl in the Mirror. I write stories, short and long, for adults and children, performing nationally and in London, was Writer in Residence for Talliston House, and have been published by Walker Books and Mslexia.
Mixing official documents with real, remembered events, Lemn Sissay’s memoir is a search for identity, for his true name. Left in a home in Liverpool for unmarried mothers, he is moved between a series of foster and care homes, until he is given access to all his records in 2015, after a thirty-year campaign to find them. He finds who he really is. It’s an honest, poignant, unsettling, and heartfelt journey, revealing how a small boy’s life is shaped by ‘the authority’ and the faceless state. Complimented with inspiring poems and useful resources, this is a hopeful and helpful book.
THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, DAILY TELEGRAPH, SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, NEW STATESMAN, METRO, DAILY MAIL, SUNDAY EXPRESS and HERALD
How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how.
At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learned that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and…
