Leo Tolstoy’s observation in Anna Karenina is famous to the point of becoming a cliché: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it wouldn’t have become a truism if it didn’t resonate—whether or not you agree with the first part, the second half is inarguably a fact. Every family plays host to its own histories, neuroses, feuds, foibles, tragedies, traumas, triggers, pains, pet peeves, and dysfunctional patterns. Literature has long borne witness to humanity’s enormous diversity of potential interpersonal horrors, all of which seem to become accentuated during stressful periods—such as the holiday season. According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping nine out of 10 U.S. adults experience stress at the end of the year, in part because they are “anticipating family conflict.”

The web is full of tips for how to deal with challenging relatives in these months. But if you’re a bookworm, your first recourse might be to turn to reading: Other people’s emotional conflagrations, fictional or not, may help you feel better about any you’re currently living out with your own family. Anyone in need of an escape can turn to this list of books. Each serves as a reminder that although your own kin may be difficult, you at least aren't related to the ones below.

Penguin Books

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

The patriarchs of two insular, upper-middle-class families, Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, have been at each other’s throats, academically speaking, for years. Their intellectual feud centers on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, but their disagreements run much deeper: Howard is white and liberal, an atheist, and a supporter of affirmative action, whereas Monty is Black and conservative, a devout Christian, and believes that affirmative action is insulting to minorities. Jerome, Howard’s eldest, interns with Monty in England and falls in love with his family, and particularly his daughter, Vee—an affair that ends embarrassingly for all. When the Kippses then move to Wellington, Massachusetts, just a couple of blocks away from the Belseys, and Monty begins teaching at the same university where Howard is a professor, things get more complicated. The men butt heads over university policies even as their wives become friends, and their daughters eye each other suspiciously while taking similar classes. Although each family has tender moments and elements of happiness too, you may well be relieved that you are part of neither.

[Read: Why families fight during holidays]

Mariner

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

In Bechdel’s genre-defining graphic memoir, she richly illustrates the beautiful Gothic Revival house she grew up in, complete with gas chandeliers, ornate lamps, and Chippendale furniture. Bechdel’s father restored this house with great devotion throughout her childhood, often enlisting her and her siblings’ reluctant help. The care he displayed wasn’t usually directed at his actual family, however. As Bechdel writes early in the book, “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.” He dies in an apparent suicide when Bechdel is in college, and in light of his death, the building he so lovingly worked on seems to have been a shallow front for his internal unhappiness. Fun Home’s pages reanimate Bechdel’s own coming-of-age alongside her growing understanding of her father, whose memory looms large over every scene—especially the ones where she visits home after he dies. When she does, it’s clear that “his shame,” Bechdel writes, “inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany.”

Penguin Books

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

The Richardsons are perfect. They have a huge house and four cars (one for each parent, one for each child old enough to have a license), and live in an idyllic neighborhood (Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of the earliest American planned communities, where lawns cannot be higher than six inches). Yet Ng’s second novel opens with destruction: The Richardson home is burning, and the cause is quickly determined to be arson. The narrative then rewinds to the previous summer, when Mia, a single mother, and her daughter, Pearl, moved into the Richardsons’ rental property at the edge of town. Pearl succumbs to the Richardsons’ charms, but Mia, an artist who has moved her child from place to place, is more cautious. Throwing further drama into the mix is the feud over Mirabelle, a baby adopted by friends of the Richardsons’ but whose birth mother is a Chinese-immigrant co-worker of Mia’s. As Mia’s, Pearl’s, and the Richardsons’ various opinions on the custody case become heightened, their worst sides quickly become apparent, and the reader can see how money and its attendant superiority complex have created a festering emptiness beneath the Richardsons’ immaculate exterior.   

[Read: How to enjoy the holidays your way]

Simon & Schuster

I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy

Everyone wants to be famous, right? Ask a former child star that question and you might get a resounding denial. In her memoir, McCurdy, who first became known for her role in the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly, writes from the perspective of her child self to great effect, introducing readers to the cutthroat world of auditions, casting directors, and bodily expectations thrust upon her as early as age 6. Her mom, Debra, always made it clear that she was vicariously carrying out her own desire to be an actor through her daughter—and McCurdy, for her part, deeply wished to fulfill her mother’s dream. Despite the book’s title, McCurdy movingly writes about how much she loved Debra amid her mom’s mood swings, overbearing expectations, and manipulative behavior, which included introducing McCurdy to calorie restriction at age 11 and insisting on showering her up through her adolescence. The result is an emotionally complex portrait of painful, abusive family dynamics, paired with an adult’s journey of recognizing, grieving, and ultimately coming to terms with them.

Vintage

Meaty, by Samantha Irby

Irby is a fan of lists, which are used to great, and hilarious, effect in her first essay collection. Meaty confronts its reader with these facts: First, the author is comfortable plumbing the most intimate depths, dents, divots, and dimples of her body for comedy. Second, she’s happy to provide some seriously easy recipes that you can make even while you’re up to your elbows in family time. Third, in her youth, Irby was the caretaker for her mom, who had multiple sclerosis. Fourth, Irby’s big sisters had moved out already, while her father was in and (mostly) out of their home, and she had to deal with normal high-school woes while also hiding the severity of her mother’s illness from teachers and social-service workers. The author writes poignantly (and also hysterically) about their role reversal: The prepubescent Irby “didn’t yet understand the difference between God and the president,” but she knew “which pills went with breakfast and which ones were taken after dinner.” Once her mother was put into a nursing home, Irby took three buses to tell her mom about the “boys I had crushes on, the chemistry teacher I hated with the fire of a thousand suns,” while also worrying about the nurses hitting her mother when she wasn’t around. The precision and humor with which she conjures her life—without glossing over the hard parts—provides much-needed distraction for the reader.

[Dear Therapist: I don’t want to see my mom this Christmas]

Penguin Classics

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Mary Katherine Blackwood, known as Merricat, and her sister, Constance, live in a mansion on a large plot of land with their uncle, Julian, who is physically ill and forgetful. The Blackwoods are a small family, but there used to be more of them, Merricat helpfully explains; soon readers learn that everyone else died after a single dinner where the sugar bowl was poisoned with arsenic. Constance was the prime suspect, and despite her acquittal on murder charges, everyone in the village near the Blackwood estate is still suspicious and hateful to the point that Constance never leaves the house’s grounds. In response, Merricat, protective of her sister to a fault, harbors cheerful fantasies about the villagers’ bloody deaths. Still, the two sisters and their uncle are rather happy in their small routines: Merricat goes to get groceries twice a week; Constance finds joy in her bright kitchen; Julian is forever at work on a historical account of the day the other Blackwoods died, at times turning to Constance to confirm that it actually happened. When distant, snobbish Cousin Charles comes to visit, Merricat immediately distrusts him, and his presence throws their tightly calibrated lives into tremendous chaos. Many families have relations whose personalities mix poorly—take pleasure in yours (hopefully) not having a combination this explosive.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Elise Hannum, an assistant editor at The Atlantic who has written about Snoopy as the hero Gen Z needs and the joy of watching awards-show speeches.

Elise listens to Fall Out Boy when she needs to get work done—a habit she hasn’t shaken since college—and unwinds by binging a chaotic Dungeons & Dragons game show and watching 30 Rock episodes.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

When history doesn’t do what we wish it would The final word on a notorious killing The 10 best albums of 2023

The Culture Survey: Elise Hannum

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The upcoming Broadway season has so many musicals that I am looking forward to, but the one I am most curious about is Lempicka, which is about the artist Tamara de Lempicka. Do I know anything about her beyond that? Nope! The production has released a few songs so far—I especially like “Woman Is”—and I listened to Eden Espinosa (who is starring as Lempicka) sing “Once Upon a Time” from Brooklyn a million times when I was younger, so I’ll be in the audience. [Related: How Broadway conquered the world]

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: The first blockbuster that popped into my head reading this question was The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I was a big fan of the book series and the movies (I once lined up outside the Mall of America in the early hours of the morning to try to see the cast, but I didn’t even get into the building). I’ve rewatched Catching Fire a few times since it first came out, and it’s just so good, both as a movie and as an adaptation.

I haven’t watched a ton of art movies (yet), but I do have a soft spot for cult classics such as But I’m a Cheerleader, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Clue. [Related: What the Hunger Games movies always understood]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’m currently watching 30 Rock all the way through for the first time, and I can see why it was so popular. I was a big fan of Parks and Recreation, so I figured I’d like it, but I did not anticipate the sheer amount of jokes the writers packed into each 21-minute episode.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I added a bunch of titles from NPR’s “Books We Love” package to my to-read list on Libby recently, and the first one I read was Empty Theatre, by Jac Jemc. It’s a fictionalized version of the lives of cousins King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elisabeth “Sisi'” of Austria. As the title suggests, the book has a lot to do with them living in excess but still yearning for what they can’t have: to love like they want to, to live like they want to. The last chapters made me gasp out loud on my couch.

Because I read a lot of nonfiction books for work, I don’t reach for them that often in my free time. Still, I remembered reading in The Atlantic about Annie Ernaux’s Look at the Lights, My Love, and I ended up really enjoying it. I may have spent too much time aimlessly wandering around Target with my friends as a teenager, so a book devoted to observations in the grocery store felt right up my alley. [Related: The year I tore through Annie Ernaux’s books]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: The first time I listened to “Adam’s Ribs,” by Jensen McRae, I spent the rest of the day playing it on a loop. For a change in pace, I’ll put on “Hot to Go!” by Chappell Roan—or practically any of the uptempo songs from her album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. There is something so satisfying about yowling out the lyric “Who can blame a girl? / Call me hot, not pretty!”

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: I haven’t completely shaken my middle-school penchant for emo and pop-punk music. I listened to Fall Out Boy when I wrote essays in college, and that’s translated over to my professional life. Folie à Deux is probably my favorite album of theirs. When they reprise a bunch of lines from their old songs on “What a Catch, Donnie”? So fun!

I was a big fan of MTV’s Teen Wolf around the same time. I had Dylan O’Brien as my phone background in a very perfunctory, pre-coming-out-as-a-lesbian sort of way. I’m not saying the show is the worst, but I tried to rewatch it during lockdown for fun and couldn’t get all the way through. It certainly wasn’t worth my dramatic liveblogs on Tumblr!

Something I recently revisited: I often revisit the soundtrack of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 once I feel even a little chill in the air. The musical is based on a small section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, so the Russian-winter vibes work this time of year. The score is gorgeous and sweeping and is sung pretty much all the way through, so I can pause and restart it throughout the day.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I do spend a lot of time scrolling through TikTok. Lately, I’ve been trying to watch any French-language videos that pop on my “For You” page, just to feel like I’m keeping myself fluent. I also play a fair amount of Candy Crush (I’m on level 5767), and I race my dad to finish the New York Times crossword. [Related: What in the world is happening on TikTok Live?]

An online creator that I’m a fan of: I kept seeing clips of the online game-show series Game Changer on TikTok, so I sought out more information and fell down a Dropout rabbit hole. The production company was a CollegeHumor rebrand before becoming a stand-alone venture with a slew of different shows. Dimension 20 successfully put me on to Dungeons & Dragons. But what I really enjoy about Dropout’s shows is how much fun everyone seems to have goofing around, and how I truly never know the direction their shows will take. (The “Escape the Greenroom” episode of Game Changer is an absolutely wild ride.)

The last thing that made me cry: The final episode of Dancing With the Stars. They’ve all come so far!

The Week Ahead

Maestro, a film depicting the dramatic relationship between the conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, the actor Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (comes to Netflix this Wednesday) Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a television show based on the acclaimed Rick Riordan fantasy series (premieres on Disney+ this Wednesday) Memory, starring Jessica Chastain as a social worker who reconnects with a high-school classmate suffering from dementia (in select theaters Friday)

Essay

Illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: "Saturday Night Live" / NBC Universal; Dudzenich / Shutterstock.

SNL’s New Kings of Bizarro Buddy Comedy

By David Sims

The video that ushered Saturday Night Live into the digital era barely made it to television, and when it did, it was largely ignored. It’s a heartfelt conversation between two friends (played by Andy Samberg and Will Forte) about a recent tragic loss; after every emotional beat, each of them takes a bite out of a large head of lettuce. When the video was screened during SNL’s live taping, the studio audience was clearly puzzled, the laughs barely rising above a polite chuckle. “Lettuce,” created in December 2005 by Samberg’s Lonely Island sketch group, could have been the end of SNL’s experimentation with prerecorded digital sketches.

But then, two weeks later, came “Lazy Sunday,” a music video in which Samberg and his SNL co-star Chris Parnell rap about “lame, sensitive stuff,” as Samberg once put it … In 2021, SNL hired Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy, a comedy team who’d met at NYU and called themselves Please Don’t Destroy. The group had developed a big following with short videos for TikTok and Twitter during the COVID lockdowns, but its members could easily have been dismissed as legacy hires by a nearly half-century-old institution: Both Higgins’s and Herlihy’s fathers wrote jokes for SNL. Despite that pedigree, the three have brought something new to the venerable sketch show, which recently returned from a hiatus lengthened by the writers’ strike. They’ve figured out how to tap into the manic, juddering energy of comedy in the smartphone era.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

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Photo Album

Workers build ice structures for the 25th Harbin Ice and Snow World, in China. (AFP / Getty)

Swimming during a heat wave in Sydney, extensive tornado damage in Tennessee, a Santa Run in Germany, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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