Seven books that explore the emotional legacy of family life

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.

Takacs's debut novel, Pearce Oysters, is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit Takacs tagged seven titles "about the ways our family leave their mark on us," including:

Absolution by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s most recent novel is, like all her work, unparalleled in its emotional nuance and observation. It’s also the most difficult to summarize of the books on this list, weaving in epistolary form through the decades. The major events of the novel take place in 1963, Saigon. Two American women—the young idealistic Patricia and the worldly “dynamo” Charlene—are brought to Vietnam by their husbands’ work during the war. Together, the women concoct their own unofficial charity to raise money for a Vietnamese hospital. Now, sixty years later, Patricia begins writing Charlene’s grown daughter to revisit the past. They weigh the women’s well-meaning attempts at “inconsequential good.” And though the novel takes up far more than a mother-daughter relationship as its subject, the letters paint a vivid picture of Charlene as a mother. I read this novel in a gallop, mesmerized.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue