LIT LISTS: Seven novels about dysfunctional (but charming) families

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Seven novels about dysfunctional (but charming) families

Jessika Bouvier is a queer Cajun writer. Her work appears in The Rumpus, Waxwing, HAD, Split Lip, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a novel about a friendship that falls apart in the Alaskan wilderness. She is also a founding editor of Chatterbox!, a journal dedicated to longform fiction.

At Electric Lit Bouvier tagged seven "family portraits [that] are full of chaos and sometimes sadness, but also deep love." One title on the list:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

For some friends, I am the only writer they know, which generally means I am also the only reader they know. That means I’m called upon as Book Recommender often, and Girl, Woman, Other is one of my staple suggestions. It’s an immersive book with equal parts seriousness and levity. There is something for everyone here. A novel-in-stories, it offers a window into the lives of 12 Black British women, ages spanning from their teens to well into their nineties. Though not all of the main cast meet on the page, they are almost all interconnected in some way—as mothers, daughters, aunts, mentors, friends, lovers. (For the curious, search engine results will reveal maps hand-drawn by readers who’ve gone through the trouble of sorting all the links.) The novel tackles several thorny topics through an intersectional lens: feminism, immigration, racism, sexuality, class, and gender identity, though these hardly scratch the surface. But the characters are not always victims. In an interview about the novel, Evaristo explained that the inclusion of “Other” in the title refers, yes, to how they’re othered by society, but also sometimes by one another. For me, this book encapsulates the full meaning of family, because it includes community as part of its working definition.