Fiction recommendations: parents and children

September 8, 2022 3:57 PM

I’d like to read stories about navigating adult parent-child relationships. Coming out stories, migration stories, anything where some tension is introduced by the child or their circumstances being something other than what the parents had in mind, and everyone has to figure out how to relate to each other in a changed world.

To give a sense of my taste, I loved Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and that’s the kind of vibe I have in mind, but maybe a funny story could be good too. I have not enjoyed Jodi Picoult and that vibe (dramatic one-sentence paragraphs, e.g.) doesn’t work for me.

posted by eirias to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Good ol' Willy Shakes had some plays on this theme. The Henry IVs spring to mind.
posted by humbug at 4:18 PM on September 8, 2022

For a memoir that reads like a novel: Crying in H Mart is totally about adult child/ parent relationship shifting and growing. (Korean-American experience. Super enjoyable read.)
posted by ojocaliente at 5:51 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree has a range of stories. Po Bronson’s Why Do I Love These People has a similar take, but I read that a loooong time ago.

Nthing: Crying in H- Mart
posted by childofTethys at 7:51 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

American Pastoral centers on the relationship between a father and his radical daughter in the 1960s.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:16 PM on September 8, 2022

Independence Day by Richard Ford is about a divorced father trying to fix his relationship with his dysfunctional son and also a lot more than that. p.s. I've read American Pastoral but didn't like it that much.
posted by storybored at 9:34 PM on September 8, 2022

I really loved Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, which I wasn’t expecting to like but did very much! Literary prose, characters I could empathize with, and very much a story of a father and daughter relating to each other in a world that keeps changing pretty dramatically (but believably).
posted by stellaluna at 9:38 PM on September 8, 2022

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 1985 by Jeanette Winterson on growing up adopted, lesbian in a fundamentalist family in Northern England. Semiautobiographical.
My Name is Why 2019 by Lemn Sissay on growing up black, wild in a fundamentalist family in Northern England. Wholly autobiographical.
And because 3 for 2 offer:
Father and Son, a study of two temperaments 1907 by Edmund Gosse on growing up poetic in a fundamentalist family in Southern England. A memoir but might as well be fiction according to recent biographies of the father.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:31 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Deliberately mis-interpreting the question as "big sister/much younger sister," I couldn't get C. S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" out of my head when I was reading your question.
posted by adekllny at 6:37 AM on September 9, 2022

I like this kind of book, too. Here are a few random selections that I have enjoyed. Be forewarned, most these are all pretty heavy, with themes of dying, parental addiction, etc. -- French Exit is the exception; it's pretty silly.

Dog Flowers: A Memoir, Danielle Geller -- From Goodreads: A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to confront her family's troubled history and retrace her mother's life—using both narrative and archive in this unforgettable and heart-wrenching memoir.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi -- From Goodreads: Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urea -- From Goodreads: The definitive Mexican-American immigrant story, a sprawling and deeply felt portrait of a Mexican-American family occasioned by the impending loss of its patriarch, from one of the country's most beloved authors.

French Exit, Patrick Dewitt --From Goodreads: From bestselling author Patrick deWitt, a brilliant and darkly comic novel about a wealthy widow and her adult son who flee New York for Paris in the wake of scandal and financial disintegration.
posted by luzdeluna at 8:45 AM on September 9, 2022