Author Tolani Akinola’s 10 Best Books About Dysfunctional Families

It was actually by accident that I wrote a novel about family. When I sat down to type out the first few pages of my novel, Leave Your Mess at Home, which published on April 14, I’d been intending to write a kind of anti-romance novel, something like a great unrequited love story that would explore all the reasons why romantic love in its modern iteration seems more like a rare feat than it does a commonplace occurrence. But from the very beginning, I quickly lost interest in the assignment I’d given myself. Hoping to fully realize my novel’s protagonist and understand her particular way of loving, I would need to know who her family had been to her. Her siblings each occurred to me as fascinating people, some of them jostling for my attention, while others offered quiet but undeniable assertions that they, too, had testimony about this business of learning to love....