Whether your relationship with your father is warm, fractured, or somewhere in the middle, these books will meet you there.
Father’s Day has a gift problem. The holiday lands every June with its golf equipment and coffee mugs, while the actual emotional terrain of fatherhood goes unacknowledged. Books, at least, have never been polite about it. If you’re looking for something to give this Father’s Day that actually means something, or if you just want to sit with the complexity of what fatherhood means to you, these seven books are where to start.
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is probably one of the starkest love stories ever written. Here, a father and his young son move through the ruins of America after some unnamed catastrophe. McCarthy strips the prose down to its bones with no quotation marks and no chapter breaks; the father’s devotion is absolute and a little terrifying.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections does something almost opposite: it stays firmly in the land of the living, of Midwestern dinners and family dysfunction and the slow, grinding embarrassment of watching a parent decline. The book understands that families contain everyone’s worst impulses and most private tenderness simultaneously, and it doesn’t pretend that love makes any of it easier.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls’s memoir centers around her father Rex Walls, an impossible figure who moved his family from one town to another, always promising that the glass castle he was designing would someday get built. It never did. Walls writes about him without sentimentality and without contempt. The result is a portrait of a father who gave his children something real while failing them in every material way, and the book sits with that contradiction instead of resolving it.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home excavates a dead father through the books he loved. Her father Bruce Bechdel was a high school English teacher and a deeply closeted gay man who died, possibly by suicide, shortly after Bechdel came out to her parents. She draws the whole story in precise and densely captioned comic panels, braiding her own coming-of-age with her father’s hidden life. It’s about the strange loneliness of a father and child who couldn’t quite reach each other, and equally odd posthumous closeness of finally understanding why.
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy is the funniest book on this list by a significant margin, the author writing about moving back into her parents’ house as an adult. Her father is a Catholic priest (long story, involves a loophole) who plays electric guitar in his underwear and holds opinions about guns and God with equal fervor. Lockwood depicts him with a kind of gleeful bewilderment that is also, unmistakably, love. The memoir captures this strange man in his natural habitat. Lockwood’s eye is so precise and her prose so genuinely weird that the portrait accumulates into something more affecting than you expect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Popular books that explore fatherhood and family include The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, and Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood.
Books about fathers often explore themes such as love, sacrifice, family, and personal growth. They can offer readers different perspectives on fatherhood and family relationships, making them meaningful Father’s Day gifts.
Some authors who have written notable books about fathers include Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Franzen, Jeannette Walls, Alison Bechdel, and Patricia Lockwood. Their works explore fatherhood through fiction, memoir, and graphic storytelling.
