Seven titles about daughters grieving their fathers

Kristina Busch is a lesbian writer living in Minnesota. She is an intern at Electric Literature, a prose editor for the Lumiere Review, and a staff editor at HerStry. She holds a BA in English from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.

At Electric Lit Busch tagged "seven books [that] portray the fragile and complex relationships between fathers and daughters, and the shock as that bond is forever severed," including:

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

A departure from the other books in this list is “family tragicomic” Fun Home by cartoonist Alison Bechdel. In this graphic memoir, Bechdel recalls her adolescence in a pristine Victorian house renovated by her father, a volatile man she struggled to connect with. When she comes out to her parents as a lesbian in the form of a letter, she learns that her father had affairs with men. This stuns Bechdel, and things become more complicated when her father dies weeks later after being hit by a truck, which she determines to be suicide and the “effect” of her coming out. In Fun Home, she desires to be truly seen by her father, a man who cannot truly live authentically himself, and seeks out this connection again through the page as she reflects on her childhood and his death. This heart-wrenching, beautifully illustrated book is considered a classic in the sapphic community for good reason.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Fun Home is among Andrew G. S. Thurman's four "bad dad" memoirs, Sam Miller's ten top books about fathers, and Ann Patchett's best books.

--Marshal Zeringue