100 books like When Did You Last See Your Father?

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. 

Dombey and Son, first published in 1846–8, is, for me, a take-down of Victorian gender roles.

Mr. Dombey is everything Victorian men were meant to be: unemotional, focused on money and commerce, driven by duty not passion – and he is clearly in the wrong. He entirely dismisses his daughter, Florence, caring only for his business and for the son who will inherit it; for him, girls and women are scarcely human.

Through the characters of Mr. Dombey and his daughter, Dickens sets up a debate between traditional Victorian ideals of masculinity and femininity – in which femininity emerges victorious. There is so much I find wonderfully proto-feminist in Dombey and Son – I haven’t even started on the wonderful character of Edith! – and I can’t recommend it enough.

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.”

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.”

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. 

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”

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?

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. 

Kate Morton is the penultimate professional at combining sweeping historical fiction and a mystery element. Any of her books are a delight, but I chose to showcase The House at Riverton because of its English aristocratic setting and the heavy mystery element. I adore Morton’s almost magical ability to successfully weave two or even three plotlines, all in different eras, into one tight story.  

Pat Barker’s prize-winning 1991 novel is a devastating portrait of the horrors of the trenches of World War One but also a meditation on why men fight, how they suffer and recover, how they live for the men they fight with.

I came to Regeneration young, and to the poems of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, all of whom appear in Barker’s novel. Sassoon’s declaration against the war is well known, as is his decision to return to it, to be with his men. Owen was killed in action.

There is also a character Barker creates: Billy Prior, a working-class figure John Mullan called “an interloper, angrily observing the snobbery and smugness of the officer class”. Regeneration shows fiction can complement reportage when considering how brotherhood works.