Books like By Blood — picked by fans

Are you like me? A people pleaser? So concerned about what the other person is feeling that I’m not even aware of my own feelings? Then this book is for you. Don’t be put off by the awkward title; it’s not about high-IQ kids. The drama is the way children must hide their true selves to please their parents; the gift is the ability to suppress our own needs.

Miller writes, “There are many children who have not been free, right from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger—and, of course, the enjoyment of their own bodies.”

I feel that! Miller explains how therapy can help us confront and heal from that rage and pain. I get mad and cry every time I reread this book.  

What happens when a client turns on a therapist? I hope I never find out.

I picked up Helene Flood's novel out of curiosity. As a writer, I wanted to know how Flood turns two people sitting in a room quietly talking into a plot that will hold readers' attention. I don’t want to give anything away, except to say her book deftly and accurately shows a clinician using her training to solve a terrible crime and save herself.

It was easy for me to identify with both the protagonist and the author. Flood and I are both practicing psychologists specializing in trauma. I’m grateful for a good read and a reminder to screen potential clients carefully.

There’s a long history of books about mental illness that regard the subject as though it exists in a bubble—something that impacts a single individual, or maybe a family, but is otherwise disconnected from broader social and political realities.

Ben Lerner’s semi-autobiographical novel hit me somewhere deep in my chest because it does precisely the opposite. With a mounting sense of dread, his book explores psychological disturbance and the attempts to treat it as phenomena rooted firmly in our world, and all the messy smaller worlds within: worlds of privilege, misogyny, and xenophobia, to name a few. I still think about the last chapter often.

I love books with sardonic humor, especially those that poke fun at psychologists and other mental health professionals. I do it in my own novels.

Most clinicians are earnest, compassionate, and ethical. But like every other profession, we have some bad apples who give psychology a bad name and deserve all the jokes and cartoons and late-night comedy sketches we get.

Shapiro’s book is about a neurotic writer with a weight problem who searches for a new therapist after her long-time clinician leaves town. Applying speed dating to her protagonist’s search for a shrink was the perfect vehicle for taking jabs at my profession.

I laughed more than I cringed. It was, for me, an opportunity to look at myself and my colleagues from the client’s point of view. 

Now we’re back in my most favorite place, San Francisco. Place is as much a character as the living, breathing people we meet in the pages of novels or non-fiction, and the author, Andrew Sean Greer, chose to tell a most curious tale in my hometown. We’re in San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century where we meet a strange gnome-like man who ages backwards. He’s in love with a young lady who is normal in every way. With a nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Life of Benjamin Button, here time is the great force that shifts reality and asks the age-old question, what does it mean to be a human being?

Emotion, in particular love, knows no bounds of race, culture, past, or future. I think love reaches uncommon heights in times of stress, which accounts for falling in love with abandon–like in wartime. Or when culture curbs or forbids love’s expression.

So here in this book, Lin Kong, a doctor, feels constrained during the Chinese Cultural Revolution–perhaps seeing through its façade of freedom, particularly in his own marriage. And upon that conundrum rests the plot: Lin’s waiting 18 years (by law) for divorce so he can be with the woman he desires. But the longer he waits, the more he desires her; then, once the waiting is over, desire leaves him.

Perhaps it is better for Lin to live in never-ending desire? Was his grass greener on the other side? 

Mildred starts out trying to fulfill all the traditional roles society expects of women as a wife and mother.  But she discovers, through travails, that she is too smart, too talented, and too natively ambitious to settle for those limitations. As Mildred gains success in the “man’s world,” she becomes the provider for everyone around her. She learns the bitterest lessons imaginable as her men and her daughter, first use her, then betray her. Against her will, Mildred Pierce becomes a fearless female in a cold cruel world. She triumphs in the end as a woman of courage, relying not on the unreliable love of others, but on her own independent spirit.

Although considered a classic, I only read this book while working on my novel, and it has haunted me ever since. The injustice of the girl’s treatment versus that of the father (who is never publicly identified in the story) left a serious impression and kept me at my writing desk.

Although English law has recognized the emotional changes a woman experiences during and after birth, the U.S. has never done so.

Lying and cheating are not even the worst things that happen in this extremely compelling, twisty debut novel about an ambitious thief named Ivy. In addition, it explores the hardships and challenges of the immigrant experience while keeping you on the edge of your seat, which is a very impressive feat on its own.

Adam is a limited edition robot who can pass for human (something I can’t do on a bad day). It takes a while for Adam to learn to be part of that world, but as time passes, he moves from being the slave of his owner Charlie to being better than him in every way (just ask his girlfriend!). I kept thinking of what would it be like to have a better version of me hanging around the house. It took slaves a long time to be recognized as people, how long for the robots?