As a social worker for 35 years, I’ve worked with thousands of children and families. I am intrigued by family dynamics: the deafening silence, the alliances, the ramrod parent, the cowering parent, the not-so innocent child. The more challenging the scenarios were always the more interesting ones. 

I wrote The Family Code in a similar vein as my therapeutic style—heavy on empathy, but straight up and to the point. I’ll lose some readers this way, just as I lost some clients. But I also unstuck some doors and opened up possibilities. There is so much richness and hope in messy, dilapidated family stories. Here are some of my favourites.

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The Push, by Ashley Audrain

The glorification and romanticization of motherhood is a crushing anvil to mothers everywhere, particularly if your child is, shall we say, odd. But maybe it’s not just the child who is odd. Perhaps it is the mother who ran out of gas and can’t see through the fog anymore? This central plot device forces readers to acknowledge that beneath the Hallmark facade of family bliss there is an ugly underbelly. The protagonist, Blythe, could be a sanitized, distant cousin to Hannah in The Family Code. Each lives with doubt, fear, confusion and resentment. Each has a past they can’t outrun.

Where The Family Code is a straight up shot of whisky, The Push is a red wine blend that is both elusive and intoxicating. I love a read that unsettles me, plays with expectations and throttles norms while keeping me panting for more.

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The Woo Woo, by Lindsay Wong

Kevin Chong and Lindsay Wong are two BIPOC writers building out from immigrant tropes of the quiet and noble, silently suffering family members who overcome barriers and hardships as they sacrifice everything for future generations.

Wong’s The Woo Woo feels like a seminal work in that she touched the third rail of Asian immigrant nonfiction—mental health and family. For this, she was richly rewarded with a Canada Reads Short List. Wong’s courageous memoir sandblasts cliches about Asian familial bonds and devotion. Instead, we enjoy a multi-screened look at the harrowing dynamics of a very atypical immigrant family. The woo woo are ghosts, which are metaphors for the forbidden topics of mental health. It is at times uproariously funny and poignant, yet also unsettling as though we were sitting in on the reality show of Wong’s life. To typecast this as an immigrant story would be a disservice to families everywhere. For The Woo Woo illustrates the complexities and taboos around mental health and spotlights it like never before. A fantastically wild family romp if there ever was one.

*

The Double Life of Benson Yu, by Kevin Chong

In the metafiction world, Kevin Chong occupies a similar space as National Book Award winner Charles Yu. As far as cutting edge stories go, Double Life is a mouthful to describe. You would be forgiven if at first it seems convoluted and gets away from you. But I suspect that’s Chong’s intention, and the rewards for perseverance are grand.   

12-year-old Benson Yu lives with his grandmother in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1980s. She is a stern, tough-love, no pain no gain kind of Chinese grandmother. I had one of those, too.

She dies and Benson is forced to fend for himself. It doesn’t take long before we are transported to the present day when we see Benson, now a father and a one-time graphic novelist of some note. Benson is trying to resurrect his career with a bio/memoir of his childhood. Unable to do so, he fictionalizes and embellishes his childhood abuser, and turns him into a mentor. However, he loses control of the narrative, and of his younger self, in this story within a story. Crafty, ambitious and wickedly inventive stuff.

*

Fall On Your Knees, by Anne-Marie McDonald

Anne-Marie McDonald’s debut Fall On Your Knees serves an emotional wallop I can’t forget. It took my breath away and I had to find someone else who had read it just so I could decompress. To say it’s a family saga would be like saying water is wet. Yes, the family bonds, secrets, strife, dark intense underbellies keep the plot rolling. But the setting of Nova Scotia circa 1900 and the Lebanese lineage inspired me to tap a similar vein in The Family Code. The characters, almost all female, are richly tailored and multi-dimensional. Thematically, it’s about the unshakeable bonds of family love which serve to overcome grief, heartache, distance and time. Have a tissue and a friend nearby for the decompression stage.

*

A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, is an epic tale set in India circa the partition. While not quite a family drama, the characters form their own out of necessity. They hit rock bottom, then fall even further into a deeper crevasse. Then deeper still. The dark inhumanity surrounding their lives, the corruption, the inequality, the struggle to survive, the absence of hope…This tone was something I wanted to emulate as I wrote The Family Code, where Hannah and Axel’s lives would descend from a burning pot to a dumpster fire to a forest fire. I also admired Mistry’s sensory-ladened images of the chaos of India. Your life and that of the characters’ lives will become emotionally enmeshed. You will be unable to put the book down as you wonder if human goodness will triumph over immorality.

*

Scarborough, by Catherine Hernandez

While not as potty mouthed and raw as The Family Code, Catherine Hernandez’s characters and setting occupy a similar margin space. Three economically-challenged families wrapped around social housing and the community school, present for many readers an introduction into the daily struggles of survival when every imaginable hurdle surrounds you. Lauded for its authenticity as it reflects the grit and dynamism of the Toronto suburb, Scarborough, Hernandez’s award-winning book was successfully adapted into a film.

*

Dandelion, by Jamie Liew

You’ll notice that in this list, family dysfunctions hinge on secrets and missing family pieces. This is consistent with the themes of self-perpetuating traumas which rely on silence in The Family Code. Jamie Liew tackles this brilliantly in her debut which centres around Lily, a new mother, who seeks answers as to why her Brunei-born-mother walked away from her own children and whereabouts has been unknown for decades. Our first impulse would be to judge the mother. But Liew skillfully challenges our capacity to empathize as Lily pieces together her mother’s need for home, community and dislocation. Dripping with compassion, Liew lyrically crafts themes of statelessness, motherhood, race and belonging. It’s no wonder Dandelion was long-listed for Canada Reads.

*

Fuse, by Hollay Ghadery

This book singularly steered me onto a run of nonfiction reads, including many celebrity memoirs. Truthfully, none were as well written as Ghadery’s Fuse, not even close. Oozing with courage and vulnerability, Fuse painfully and at times, reluctantly, probes and explores mental health issues in biracial women. While it has elements of memoir, it is a series of meditations that probe different parts of Ghadery’s fractured biracial experience. These include eating and anxiety disorders, self-mutilation, sex, motherhood, her messy, tumultuous family and the simultaneous allure and rejection of aesthetic beauty. Ghadery’s poetic strengths clearly shine as the language is at times, stunningly beautiful. Be prepared to be blown away by her story and her prose.

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Learn more about The Family Code:

Every family has rituals and routines holding them together. But sometimes they are the very things that tear them apart. The Family Code is a gritty family drama featuring the troubled life of Hannah Belenko, a young single mother dogged by the brutality of past traumas and a code of silence that she must crack in order to be free—or else lose everything.

Hannah was raised by this code and rules her own family by it. When she loses her daughter to the state and her boyfriend threatens her, she flees from Ottawa to Halifax with her remaining son, six-year-old Axel. While she bulldozes her way through everything and schemes to protect him, Axel flounders in the chaos. He begins to doubt his mother and her dream of a way out. With her life crashing down, Hannah is driven by desperation to survive yet hangs on to elusive hope.

With unvarnished and high-voltage prose, The Family Code unabashedly reveals the power and perils of parenting, but also the longing and vulnerability of children.