84 books like Fun Home

This book taught me what “nonfiction” is.

Bechdel uses her narrator as a vehicle for thinking (in this case, for thinking through a narrator’s complex relationship with her mother), using a constellation of sources from Donald Winnicott to Virginia Woolf to The Sound of Music. She perfects the illusion/truth central to this genre: that we’re witnessing the writer’s process of discovery in real time.

When I’m inside the book, I feel as though I’m inside Bechdel’s brain. I know this feeling is a testament to her craft, but I still couldn’t help thinking, when I finished the book, that Bechdel was my friend. I wanted to call her up to continue our conversation about our parents—even though we’ve never met. 

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.

I may never have written nonfiction had I not read and taught these astonishing essays. (I first read this book nearly twenty years ago, and I still teach Beard’s essays.)

Beard makes me believe in the complete personhood of her young narrators (sometimes young enough to be sleeping in cribs), and their ability to be the vehicle through which she can remember and make visible a family’s truths, secrets, and hilarities.

Beard’s work gave me license to turn my own younger self into a character who, with her intuitive understanding of her own family, could do battle for me on the page.

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.” 

My son works with the unhoused in our city.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Immersed in a boarding school with my parents living on another continent, I searched for comfort and found it in Charlotte Brontë’s novel of a young orphan struggling to make her way in Victorian England.

Although considered by some to be shocking when it was published in 1847, it was a sensation and has never been out of print since. 

"Do you think," she cries to the rich Mr Rochester, the man she loves, "because I am poor, plain and little, that I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart."

Complete with Gothic frills, brooding landscapes and high drama, leavened with intelligence and psychological acuity, Jane Eyre is a love story which contains one of the great cries for equality in literature.

Who could fail to respond? I certainly did, and I remember it every time… show more.

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.

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.