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Author Tolani Akinola’s 10 Best Books About Dysfunctional Families

Messy families are commonplace, but the parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles in these books are drawn with such specificity and strangeness that they’ll lodge themselves permanently in your mind.

It was actually by accident that I wrote a novel about family. When I sat down to type out the first few pages of my novel, Leave Your Mess at Home, which published on April 14, I'd been intending to write a kind of anti-romance novel, something like a great unrequited love story that would explore all the reasons why romantic love in its modern iteration seems more like a rare feat than it does a commonplace occurrence. But from the very beginning, I quickly lost interest in the assignment I'd given myself. Hoping to fully realize my novel's protagonist and understand her particular way of loving, I would need to know who her family had been to her. Her siblings each occurred to me as fascinating people, some of them jostling for my attention, while others offered quiet but undeniable assertions that they, too, had testimony about this business of learning to love. Their personalities and voices each came to me with distinction, as did their various conflicts, leading me to wonder what kind of home had produced four children who were each so… aggy and who collectively struggled to find safe harbor in one another.

The American Psychological Association defines a dysfunctional family as one in which "relationships or communication are impaired, and members are unable to attain closeness and self-expression." By that definition, the Longe family begins the novel in a most dysfunctional state of affairs. One sibling is the scapegoat, the other a golden child, another a people pleaser and the youngest a lost child. Foisted into these archetypal roles, they each struggle to identify what they want, who they are and who they might want to be to one another. They share, of course, some particularities, like being second-generation Nigerian immigrants from a working-class background, as well as wrestling with sometimes conflicting cultural expectations. They also all happen to share, in the two months in which we meet them, issues with loving. Messy families are commonplace, some might even say ubiquitous, so what does it take to make one stick with a reader?

As I look back on my journey in crafting this novel, I'm excited to reflect on the many books that taught me something about how to make a messy family compelling. Some of these books I read before I had any inkling about the specific family that makes up Leave Your Mess at Home. Others I read well after I had finished my novel. But each of them provided a needed education in how family creates our personhood, how it can be a unit of belonging or a unit of unbelonging, how it can be a shelter from the oppressive systems in the world outside the home or reify them within the home. Writing can be such isolating work, and I'm grateful to have had these books to turn to as a comfort, and a nod of affirmation, along the way.

Must-read books about messy families

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

All is not well with the Belsey household, but everything was well with me as I laughed my way through On Beauty's pages. This family is charmingly dysfunctional. For starters, they have a rival family. I don't know very many families with actual rivals, but Howard Belsey, the father and philandering husband, has one and expects his family to honor the line of demarcation drawn between them. They, of course, do not. His arch-nemesis, Monty Kipps, is an academic like himself, though unlike himself, Kipps is dapper, Black, conservative and religious. Kipps' views on art and the university's function have plagued Howard for years. Howard is a devoted liberal whose non-religious household and interracial marriage are meant to be an extension of his commitment to inclusivity, although he is a walking contradiction, stonewalling his eldest son for........

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