28 books like The Patrick Melrose Novels

I love this book because it made me laugh, it made me cry, and it cracked my heart wide open. Although I am not a drug addict and have not struggled with addiction in the traditional sense, I found this book completely relatable in terms of emotional pain and trying to surmount psychological patterns.

Rowland Hill’s account of his childhood is hilarious and yet it is an affectionate portrayal of his family and their failings. There is the sense of not being understood by his father, which I experience. This is an intelligent, brilliant book about healing, spiritual awakening, truth, and bleak pain. In other words, it is an original book about life.

This book is a fearsomely clever collection of essays on love, marriage, and adultery, all written through the lens of trying to better understand the complexity of the human heart. Touching and tender, these explorations of relationships are wincingly honest and clearly written straight from the writer’s heartfelt experience

There is a purity of emotional intelligence to the book, which I find reassuring. Reading about the writers' relationship f*ck-ups, which they stumble into as if falling into potholes, made me feel okay about my own stumbling efforts to navigate my emotional life.

This book took my breath away.

This is no pithy or glib advice column book bound by word counts and editorial edits. Her advice is lengthy and considered and beautifully interwoven with her poignant personal stories. Her advice is raw and poetic. Not flowery or pretty poetry, but punch you in your soul, pierce directly into your heart truth bombs.

It’s tough love to the extreme. Every single entry took my breath away with its unflinching rawness. And, at the same time, delivered with compassion and care that I felt somehow … loved. There’s humor in this book, but it’s subtle, and it captures the wonder and madness and beauty and crazy courageousness needed to live in our bizarre world. 

A Theatre for Dreamers captures the halcyon days of the 60s artistic community on the Greek Island of Hydra. It focuses on the international bohemian set, including the authors Charmian Clift and George Johnston. Among the artists, poets and hangers-on are a Norwegian couple—Axel Jensen and Marianne Ihlen—and a young, charismatic Canadian by the name of Leonard Cohen. It is narrated by the likable ingenue Erica, a novitiate novelist in her late teens whose mother’s dying wish was for her daughter to go off on an adventure. Erica is like Nick Carraway, mainly on the periphery of events, observing and learning from the more experienced, glamorous people she has fallen in with. Interesting fact: author, Polly Samson, is married to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.

I read this probably when I was in my early twenties. Randle McMurphy was, and still is, to some degree, an inspiring character: a rebellious soul, a flawed genius, a bit of a wrong’un at times, but also a hilariously cocky piss-taker.

There’s something deeply human in the portrayal of this character and his conflict with institutionalised authority, as represented by the frankly terrifying Nurse Ratched. It may be set in a psychiatric hospital, but I find the themes relatable to the wider world, the constant pressure to conform or be crushed. I still feel incensed by it.

I love this book because it sweeps me into the wild, wonderful, free spirit of the 1960s.

Although it is ostensibly nonfiction, Wolfe uses a singular hip, frantic voice to propel readers into the weird world of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they cavort with the Grateful Dead at the infamous, hedonic LSD-laced Acid Tests, journey around the country in the psychedelically-painted bus nicknamed Further, and eventually head for Mexico to avoid arrest.

I've read this book multiple times, and on each occasion, it's like time-traveling to one of my favorite eras.

George Bone is a sensitive drunk with a touch of psychosis and a modest private income. Leading a rackety life in pre-war Earls Court, he’s in love with a sponger, a failed actress who wants to exploit him for his connections, and he bears her humiliations without complaint. But sometimes, something clicks in his brain and he imagines killing her and her seedy sidekick and going home to Maidenhead and peace. Boarding houses and bottle parties, blow-outs in the West End and Brighton: Hamilton captures a miserable, boozy, coarse and uptight world, and provides an ending to match.

I first read this book as an angsty artist in college. It was as if the Universe sent me a gift that I needed precisely when I needed it. Rilke–an older/wiser poet, wrote the 10 letters in the book to a young Franz Kappus–a budding/insecure poet. All artists suffer from insecurity, and Kappus wants to know if his poems are good and what he should do.

We all want to do Important and Good work (with capital I’s and G’s). Rilke gently and masterfully steers Kappus to understand that true art is a process and involves every aspect of an artist’s life, that it is often a lonely endeavor but worth it for so many reasons. I felt as if Rilke was speaking to me–as a loving grandfather–with words of encouragement, but also in truth. Nothing was sugar-coated, but I so related and wanted to be the wise creator that… show more.

Stein puts her finger on one of the most important things I learned about the power of charismatic, narcissistic abusers: with love-bombing and seduction, they create dependence in their victim. Then, the belittling and humiliating begins, and the victim is now both dependent on the abuser and constantly intimidated by the abuser.

This is the essence of disorganized attachment, which creates a sense of powerlessness and fright without solution. Victims feel unable to leave, exhaust themselves trying to assuage the narcissist, and dissociation becomes the automatic survival response. Knowing this helps victims and their therapists understand why recovering the ability to think clearly is so difficult and so crucial for victims recovering from traumatic abuse.

A fictionalized version of the author's harrowing autobiography, this series of short, consecutive novels is a compelling and intensely moving story of trauma and recovery. We are shown how childhood sexual abuse and emotional neglect is a murder of the child's soul, how it can lead to addiction and self-loathing, and how recovery becomes a matter of choosing life over death.

The author gives us relentless honesty, focused prose, acute insight, and sharp, wickedly incisive wit. Slowly, steadily, Melrose heals and grows, understanding more and feeling more. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. In some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read, St. Aubyn describes the essence of healing from trauma: the experience of deeply felt, overwhelming compassion and empathy.