The best novels about families affected by addiction

From the first paragraph, with its almost-throwaway mention of how a hook had given a coat "a permanent hump behind the collar," Lights All Night Long transports you with its authenticity. The bond between Ilya, a Russian teenager who wins a scholarship to study in a Louisiana high school, and his older brother, Vladimir, whose addiction to krokodil has replaced his urge to escape their industrial town, is limned beautifully. A mystery drives the plot, but that’s not why I love this book. What kept me reading was the heartbreaking truth of its world.  

This is a story of two siblings. Mickey is a police officer; her sister, Kacey, is a heroin-addicted prostitute. The setting is Kensington, a notorious drug-ravaged neighborhood in my hometown of Philadelphia. Kacey has gone missing, and Mickey fears she may have been the victim of a killer who’s been targeting prostitutes, so she inserts herself into the investigation. The dual mysteries—where’s Kacey, and who are the killers—give the story its shape. But the relationship between the sisters, the glimpses of their childhoods, and the depiction of growing up among addicts shooting up on the sidewalk and nodding off in doorways are Long Bright River’s heart and soul. 

Dealing with an addicted child or sibling is traumatic enough; when the addict is your parent, the person who is supposed to protect and support you, the fear and betrayal are ramped up to an unbearable level. One of the Boys captures this in all its harrowing detail. Two barely teenaged boys move with their father from Kansas to New Mexico, where the father’s descent into meth addiction obliterates any sense of responsibility, affection, and decency he might once have possessed. Narrated by the younger son, One of the Boys is more than a realistic depiction of addiction; it also shows how far children will go to gain or retain a parent’s love, which is what makes the story so devastating.

Shuggie Bain invades the senses: You smell the sour breath of Shuggie’s mum as she snores, open-mouthed, in a drunken stupor; you feel the stiffness of the rug where endless spilled drinks were left to dry. Just as important, you feel the push-and-pull of love and despair, hope and anger, as Shuggie grows up, the youngest child of an alcoholic who is ultimately abandoned by the rest of their family. The final chapters, as Shuggie moves into adolescence and struggles to break from the burden of becoming caretaker to the woman who should have been taking care of him, are exceptional.

So far as I know, this novel, published in 1848, is one of the first fictional depictions of life with an abusive alcoholic. (True, Wuthering Heights by Anne’s sister Emily features the drunken Hindley, but in that book’s world of chaos, his behavior isn’t any more damaging than that of the other characters.) In Tenant we discover that a seemingly respectable marriage is one of disgust, pain, and humiliation for Helen, the titular tenant, and as she sees her aristocratic husband’s influence over their son grow stronger, she takes unconventional action. The book was shockingly frank for its time; now it’s considered a landmark feminist novel as well as a realistic depiction of a family devastated by substance abuse.