Here are 81 books that Fun Home fans have personally recommended once you finish the Fun Home series.
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I was adopted as a baby, so I have first-hand experience of the emotions and challenges this presents. I am passionate about shining light on this often misunderstood and complex family trauma through my writing. My memoir Blood and Blood, an emotive exploration of the search for my birth relatives, was shortlisted for the Mslexia Prize. My research extends to fiction and non-fiction, where the psychological effects of adoption are referenced or highlighted. I am always keen to chat with fellow care-experienced people. I hope you find the books on this list helpful.
One thing about being adopted is you have an in-built radar to seek out others who are too. I read Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit when I was a teenager, and since then, I have been in awe of her as a writer and her ability to eloquently describe her personal experience as an adoptee.
This book is her autobiography, and there were occasions while reading it that I had to stop and cry. Finally, someone else had written about what I had kept holed up inside me. Her final chapter, "The Wound," speaks so profoundly to me as an adopted adult. It is honest, sharp, and fierce.
The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness,…
I have been passionate about making, reading, and studying comics for my whole life. When I first encountered autobiographical comics, they were all by women who I looked up to for their ability to tackle their lives with both words and images. This is a small list and biased towards the cartoonists I first encountered in the world of female autobiographical comics. There is so much more out there. I love how the flexibility and history of the comic form have allowed for so much blending of genres and styles.
Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s most famous work (and it is phenomenal), but this one captured my heart. While the former focuses on her father, here Bechdel turns her focus on her relationship with her mother, weaving in a lot of psychoanalysis and modernist literature.
Bechdel’s characteristic intricacy and attention to detail are on full display, and the frequent inclusion of dreams and their interpretation (a particular interest of mine) make the whole book feel almost surreal yet completely grounded.
An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from the author of Fun Home.
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon. While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven.
Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
I can’t create a list of recommended books based on books I love without Patrick Lane’s 1978 Poems: New and Selected.
Every author remembers that book, the one that both showed them what writing could do and inspired them to try it, too. For me, this book is the perfect marriage between down-to-earth-and-sometimes-unbearably-painful life and sublimely beautiful language.
This book is what I’d show you if you asked me what the saying means, “Hymns to the light are best sung in darkness.”
One of Canada's most distinguished poets and winner of the Governor General's Award in 1979 for Poems New and Selected , Patrick Lane deserves much admiration for his remarkable poetic achievement. This new volume of his verse traces the evolution of his work and includes both poetry from his previously published collections and a number of new poems.
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
This is a book about extreme compassion, and the long and torturous work of it in the face of neighbourhood fear and municipal hostility towards those who live without fixed addresses and all that that entails.
Further, I see in Encampment the hope that on a personal and social level, we all have it within us to understand people we didn't think we could and keep alive the capacity we're born with to love those whom so many tell us we should not.
An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard
The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto's Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and…
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
I’ve often told my students that the poetry most meaningful for you either puts into words things you’ve wanted to say but didn’t have the words for, or it gives you words for experiences you haven’t had but might be waiting for you somewhere down the road.
Stuart’s poetry has long amused and challenged me with his play at language and disruption of conventions, but in this book, I am made aware that he and I are born only a couple of years apart, and in some things, like the subjects of this book, he’s just up ahead, telling me what’s in store: what it is to be the last living member of your birth family, what it is to lose one of your oldest friends.
Poetry is sometimes just the wisdom of growing old made pure by art, and this is one of those times.
A poignant meditation on mortality from a beloved Canadian poet
A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and “real” in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In this hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation, Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss. Written during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after the sudden…
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
Stefanie Green administered my mother’s medically assisted death, and among the stories in the book is my and my brother's farewell with her.
It wasn’t a long story – just a paragraph among chapters – and I read the book to find out more about my mother’s choice and the choice of the doctor who cared for her. I say “cared” because for my mother, a medically assisted death turned hopelessness about the end of her life into the happiness of having a choice in a situation in which she was otherwise helpless.
In her account of my mother’s last moments, Stefanie showed me what I did not see at the time, and that insight only added more meaning to the story of my mother’s life.
An international bestseller, this compassionate memoir by a leading pioneer in medically assisted dying who helps suffering patients explore and fulfill their end of life choices is "written with sensitivity, grace, and candor...not to be missed" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Dr. Stefanie Green has been forging new paths in the field of medical assistance in dying since 2016. In her landmark memoir, Dr. Green reveals the reasons a patient might seek an assisted death, how the process works, what the event itself can look like, the reactions of those involved, and what it feels like to oversee proceedings and administer…
As an acupuncturist and die-hard romantic, I did a deep dive into Taoist teachings when the love of my life passed away suddenly. I was looking for comfort, for answers, for reassurance that such intense chemistry can somehow transcend death. What happened is a long-buried desire to be an author started spinning my grief into Atlantis Writhing, a romantasy I hoped would uplift others enduring a dark night of the soul.
I was sixteen when I first read Jane Eyre, and I was thoroughly unprepared for how it would change the course of my life.
My mother died when I was eleven, so I found a kindred spirit in the orphaned main character Jane. By the time she grew up and became a governess for the brooding Mr. Rochester, I cared deeply about her happiness.
As intense chemistry sparked between Jane and her employer, I realized that my true joy in life would be to write “can’t put it down” love stories like this one.
Little treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader.
Perhaps one of the most well-known books in the world, Jane Eyre follows the life of its eponymous orphaned protagonist. From her early life Jane is strong-willed, passionate and kind but comes up against a lot of struggles. She lives with her aunt and uncle during early childhood, where she…
I was an odd kid—a bookworm worried about why I was different from others. Luckily, my family continuously reminded me that I belonged. Once out of the closet, I was able to appreciate the importance of families, both chosen and unchosen. I became a writer because I was compelled to articulate that importance and maybe help others understand how knowledge, trauma, emotions, and love move between the generations. Queer and family histories have inspired a lot of my journalism and fiction, but especially my new novel, This Is It. I hope it fits alongside these recommendations that explore queer multi-generational stories with wit, intelligence, and wisdom.
There is a dark undertow to this book that I didn’t detect in its early pages. Once I was a third of the way through, I was hooked. It’s the story of Wendy, a trans sex worker living through a bracing Winnipeg winter, but it’s also a uniquely queer examination of trauma and abuse offset by the value of family and community.
Her chosen family is produced by circumstance, but it grows its own unique qualities. Meanwhile, her attempts to have a relationship with her father eschew cliché as she reimagines that connection on her own terms. She’s bright and gloomy at once, humorous, curious, and imperfect. Her story is a visceral one; she stuck with me well after I finished it.
WINNER, Lambda Literary Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction; $60,000 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
In this extraordinary debut novel by the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning story collection A Safe Girl to Love, Wendy Reimer is a thirty-year-old trans woman who comes across evidence that her late grandfather—a devout Mennonite farmer—might have been transgender himself. At first she dismisses this revelation, having other problems at hand, but as she and her friends struggle to cope with the challenges of their increasingly volatile lives—from alcoholism, to sex work, to suicide—Wendy is drawn to the lost pieces of her grandfather’s life,…
I was an odd kid—a bookworm worried about why I was different from others. Luckily, my family continuously reminded me that I belonged. Once out of the closet, I was able to appreciate the importance of families, both chosen and unchosen. I became a writer because I was compelled to articulate that importance and maybe help others understand how knowledge, trauma, emotions, and love move between the generations. Queer and family histories have inspired a lot of my journalism and fiction, but especially my new novel, This Is It. I hope it fits alongside these recommendations that explore queer multi-generational stories with wit, intelligence, and wisdom.
I love any work that can draw me in by being uncanny while still being emotional. This book is such a work. It's the story of a gay bar that houses a community of cross-generational queer people who become close-knit while the world outside becomes more and more hostile to them.
Though he tells the story with distance and coldness, Neil Bartlett made me feel like I belonged in that bar, in that community. Reading how the characters clutch at meaning and love, how they embrace who they are, and how they support one another had me rooting for them (and for myself) louder every time I turned a page.
It is 3 a.m. in The City, and in a dark corner of The Bar, two lovers collide in the beginnings of a passionate and violent affair.
Boy: nineteen, beautiful, ready for anyone to take him home, and 'O': the Older Man, cynical, unpredictable, and at the mercy of his personal demons. Their romance is orchestrated and observed by the owner of The Bar, Madame, who looks after her boys and ensures that their haven remains inviolate.
At once a joyful celebration of homosexual love and culture, and a devastating evocation of the homophobic climate which stemmed from the 80s…
I was an odd kid—a bookworm worried about why I was different from others. Luckily, my family continuously reminded me that I belonged. Once out of the closet, I was able to appreciate the importance of families, both chosen and unchosen. I became a writer because I was compelled to articulate that importance and maybe help others understand how knowledge, trauma, emotions, and love move between the generations. Queer and family histories have inspired a lot of my journalism and fiction, but especially my new novel, This Is It. I hope it fits alongside these recommendations that explore queer multi-generational stories with wit, intelligence, and wisdom.
This novel was like gravity; I felt like the author dropped me into the 70-year storyline, and I was powerless to stop myself from falling through its many layers. Each character was so vivid and whole that I cared deeply for each of them.
The connections between the different generations of gay men made me feel like I—a queer author myself—was part of a spanning, meaningful history full of ache, loss, love, and humor.
“Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst.” —Esquire
From the winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly novel that spans seven transformative decades as it plumbs the complex relationships of a remarkable family.
In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athletic, charismatic, he is unaware of his powerful effect on others—especially on Evert Dax, the lonely and romantic son of a celebrated novelist who is destined to become a writer himself.…
