11 Novels About Dysfunctional Families to Put You at Ease When You're Home for the Holidays
Looking for an escape from the family function? Read these books by Emma Straub, Zadie Smith, and more.
When you're looking to get lost in a book, sometimes you need your reading material to match your mood. With Marie Claire's series "Buy the Book," we do the heavy lifting for you. We're offering curated, highly specific recommendations for whatever you're looking for—whether you're in your feels or hooked on a subgenre trending on #BookTok.
Ah, the holidays: Cozy parties, festive outfits, and, for many, family time…lots of it. If that last phrase sent a snowman-sized shiver down your spine, we see you. While some may savor prancing down memory lane and revisiting beloved traditions with family, others load up on therapy until the new year. Between explaining why you’re not married, not pregnant, not working, studying, or generally excelling at life, the holidays can usher in some big feelings.
For ages, writers have mined all the dysfunction families can deliver (hi, Shakespeare!) for their work. While plenty have delved into the drama of it all, others have struck a gloriously deranged balance of humor, satire, and chaos. And so, as the holidays hurtle toward us faster than we can say Eldest Daughter Syndrome, we invite you to disassociate via a novel about a family nearly as unhinged as your own.
Below, check out some of the best big-hearted, hilariously moving novels about families that put the fun in dysfunction.
If the classic '90s movies Stepmom and The Birdcage had a book baby, it might be The Guncle. Patrick, a once-famous sitcom actor, is enjoying his hazy solitude in Palm Springs. But when his sister-in-law passes away and his brother fights his demons in rehab, Patrick is stuck with his niece and nephew for the summer.
The kids have always loved spending time with GUP (Gay Uncle Patrick). But those stints were during holidays and long weekends—not a full summer and definitely not unsupervised. As the children mourn the loss of their mother, Patrick processes his own grief, and the unlikely trio learns and heals from one another. If you’ve found yourself rewatching Father of the Bride or The Family Stone as of late, this one’s for you.
Want more GUP? You’re in luck: There’s a sequel, The Guncle Abroad, and it's ideal reading material for spring break with the fam.
You know those books you wish you could live inside of? This is one of them. A follow-up to Catherine Newman's popular novel, Sandwich, it returns to Rocky and her delightfully riotous cohort a few years later. Since we last saw Rocky, her mother has passed away, and her elderly father has moved into her home’s backyard ADU.
Meanwhile, Rocky has discovered a rash that’s not going away. She does what any sane person would do: Googles what it could be, and checks in with her doctor, which opens a can of worms like no other. Saddled with anxiety, Rocky juggles her work as a freelance writer while helping her adult daughter, Willa, navigate her anxiety, as Rocky’s husband tries to fix a fan without slicing his fingers off. Whew! And that’s, like, the first 10 pages—but it only gets better. At the top of the novel, a tragic accident occurs, which Rocky becomes fixated on, perhaps, to take her mind off her rash.
Relatable, laugh-out-loud funny, and as heartwarming as Sandwich, Wreck had this writer looking up if it was possible to be adopted by a fictional family. (Sadly, it’s not.)
If you’ve never stepped foot inside the Kevin Wilson universe, consider us the welcome wagon. It’s just a normal day in Coalfield, Tennessee on Madeline Hill’s farm when a car pulls up and a nervous man steps out with news she’d never anticipate: His name is Reuben, and he is her half-brother. He informs her that there are even more of them—deserted Hill half-siblings scattered across the U.S., none of whom know about the others.
Reuben, bearer of quizzical news, convinces Mad to embark on a cross-country road trip to collect the rest of their half-siblings. Though strangers, they all share the wounds of being abandoned by their father, who ghosted all of them after leaving. The half-siblings drive west, picking up more Hills in pursuit of their father and the answers he never provided.
As the siblings squeeze into Rube’s PT Cruiser, they become closer than they might have ever imagined. Brimming with sibling squabbles and tender vulnerability, Run for the Hills is a wild premise that could only come to life with Wilson at the helm. A magician of dysfunctional families, Wilson wields his storytelling powers over the most unlikely of circumstances. Once you’re finished this read, be sure to check out his other novels, Now Is Not the Time to Panic or Nothing to See Here.
Sometimes, family isn’t what you’re born into, but what you create. So it goes on Angela Flournoy’s sophomore novel, The Wilderness, which follows a group of friends across years, relationships, and cities.
At the start of the novel, Desiree is accompanying her grandfather to Europe for an assisted death by suicide. The decision to join him fractures a rift between her and her sister, Danielle, and pushes Desiree to become even closer to her best friends, January, Nakia, and Monique, who are searching for their own paths. While their view on where to go and what to do with their lives may be murky, they rely on each other for tough love and ongoing support. As time unfolds and decisions are made, the group watches in awe (and sometimes horror) at what their chosen sisters have done with their lives. Though members of the group move from L.A. to New York and back again, one thing remains unwavering: their love and admiration, even when they want to strangle each other.
With an ending that has a full-blown twist you won’t anticipate (but will sob over nonetheless), The Wilderness is a testament to female friendship that’s relatable, heart-wrenching, and completely stunning.
When cracking open a Gary Shteyngart novel, you know you’re in for a good time. His latest, Vera, or Faith, follows suit. In a near-future Manhattan, democracy is on the brink of collapse, cars drive themselves, and 10-year-old Vera is trying to keep her family together. Vera, a Korean-American, lives in real time as roles and civil rights are shifting, while she aches to meet her Korean birth mother. Told from Vera’s perspective, readers will at once become enamored with the girl, while fearing for her well-being. Prescient, comical, and endearing, Shteyngart delivers a dystopian novel, for once, that won’t make you feel too terrible about the future.
The author of Fleishman Is In Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, returned with a hilarious and chaotic story of a family living in a wealthy enclave of Long Island. Trouble finds the Fletcher family early in the novel when, in 1980, patriarch Carl is kidnapped in front of his house and held for ransom.
And that’s not the most stressful thing that happens. This potboiler picks up almost 40 years later, where the kidnapping has marked each family member—Carl’s wife, Ruth, and their three children, Nathan, Beamer, and Jenny—to a withering degree. With each character commanding passages throughout the novel, Brodesser-Akner creates a heart-pounding, fly-on-the-wall read. As the once famously rich Fletcher cohort learn their fortune has gone bust, the family goes to distressing lengths to get back on track—if they can get out of their own way.
A propulsive read, the audiobook further elevates the knotty plot. You can basically hear the characters's blood pressure spike.
In a near-future Brooklyn, May, the former breadwinner of her family, has lost her job. As a result, her family is sinking into debt. Subsisting on her husband’s income as a glorified Task Rabbit, the family is drifting apart amidst the tension, each preferring the company of their phones rather than each other, spending much of their time in their individual “wombs,” or VR pods on steroids.
So, when May is presented with an opportunity to participate in a trial that'll pay handsomely, she jumps on it. The catch? The procedure renders her face unidentifiable to the cameras lining the streets, stores, everywhere. She goes through with it anyway. With the cash burning a hole in her pocket, she decides to live a little and books the family a stay at the Botanical Gardens, now an exclusive retreat. But, when something goes terribly awry during their stay, May realizes that her effort to save the family may have put it in an even more compromising position.
Begging to be made into a limited TV series, Hum will hook you from the first line. Good luck trying to go to sleep before you finish; it’s that good.
Zadie Smith is not one to shy away from complicated family dynamics. Case in point: Her 2005 novel, On Beauty. The novel proves that, sometimes, it takes another family to illuminate the cracks within one's own. The Belseys and Kipps are at odds on just about everything, which of course means they can’t get out of each other’s way. It’s partially because Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps work: They’re both art historians who specialize in Rembrandt.
Pushed together through fate and academia, the families partake in a tragic pas de deux. First, there’s the case of Jerome, Howard’s child, who’s seemingly been converted by ultra-conservative Monty. Then there’s the burgeoning friendship between Kiki, Howard’s wife, and Carlene, who’s married to Monty. Not to mention some unseemly sharing between the patriarchs that hurts an innocent. And so much more.
If you’ve been searching for a novel that has the capital-D drama of a 19th-century novel with tongue-in-cheek social commentary minus the stuffy prose, On Beauty is for you. Read this after you’ve watched the new Wuthering Heights.
Whether you’re reading Emma Straub’s delicious novel for the first or 40th time, picking it up is always a good idea. Astrid Strick is running errands in town when she witnesses a longtime acquaintance get hit by a bus. Traumatic as hell, the experience cracks something open in Astrid and shortly thereafter comes clean to her three adult children, Porter, Elliott, and Nicky, about a secret she’s been hiding for years.
The news coincides with the arrival of Nicky’s 13-year-old daughter, Cecilia, who’s to live with her grandmother as she recovers from a terrible bullying incident at her Brooklyn school. As the Strick family navigates Astrid’s news, disrupting the image they always had of their mother while flailing through adult life, they spin toward complete upheaval.
Told from multiple Strick perspectives, All Adults Here feels like a Nora Ephron movie in print. It’s a story about acceptance, forgiveness, and the people who have seen you at your worst—and loving them all the more for it.
Sometimes, when reading a doorstopper of a novel, you wish for it to end. This is not the case with Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, which was listed for about every prize when it was published in 2023. The Barnes family, a formerly well-off Irish family, is struggling. They’re not alone—it’s 2008 and, like so many of their friends, the Barneses are watching their life’s work circle the drain. But, while others might band together to fight against financial ruin, the Barneses twirl off into their own orbits, driven by resentment, fear, and regret.
Take Imelda Barnes, for example, mother to Cass and PJ, wife to Dickie, who is seething over having to part with her beloved jewelry and designer clothes. Or PJ, who gets so swept up in clearing out an abandoned cabin with his father, he puts everything on the line. As fissures grow within the family, it’s unclear what can save them. With an ending that will have you combing Reddit threads for hot takes, this tome delivers a major payoff.
Could a curse get in the way of finding love? For the Duong women, the answer is absolutely. After an ancestor breaks up her marriage for true love, a curse is placed on her descendants, plaguing all the women in her family to miss out on love. Fast forward to the present day, and Mai and her sisters, Minh Pham and Khuyen Lam, and their children understand the depth of the curse intimately.
But when a clairvoyant aunt sees a major tide change, Mai and her family can only hope to hold on to each other for dear life. Perfect for anyone who’s been in a dating rut or tired of having their family meddle in their personal life, The Fortunate of Jaded Women is a comical romp of missteps and the type of humiliation only a family member can inflict.
