5 Big Families in Fiction

We, the members of large families, are a rare bunch. People just don’t have as many kids as they used to, and this has made big families exotic anomalies. Whenever I tell someone that I’m the youngest of seven kids, the news is met with the sort of wide-eyed wonderment you’d expect from an audience watching a fire-breather.

Finding our counterparts in contemporary literature can be tricky. Logistically, this makes sense—that’s a lot of characters for both writer and reader to keep track of. And even when fictional families do have lots of kids, the largeness of the family is often played for laughs, as in The Collected Stories of Nurse Matilda, featuring a pack of children who can’t even keep track of their own names.

So are there any novels out there that really represent the ins and outs of large families (for argument’s sake, defined as five kids or more)? Yes! Here are 5 of the best:

The Gathering, by Anne Enright (12 kids)
This winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize follows the Hegerty family, a large Irish brood raised in Dublin. As the book opens, the Hegertys are gathering for the funeral of their brother Liam. The novel centers on Liam’s sister Veronica, and the history of the family unfolds through her recollections and memories. There are so many elements in this book that fall into what is stereotypically “Irish”: drunken fights, domestic violence, melancholy, suicide, and pretty much everything depressing. But this book is so much more than that. Thanks to Enright’s command of language, the story doesn’t dwell (or depend too much) on these tragic tropes to move it along; rather, they act as idiosyncrasies of each character. Through Veronica’s memories, the reader is also asked an important question any family faces: How do you know what’s true and what’s fiction in stories when they become as much a part of a family as the people in them?

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, by Ayana Mathis (11 kids)
As a teenager in 1923, Hattie Shepard fled Georgia in search of a better life in Philadelphia. What Hattie finds, though, is far from what she’s looking for, and it turns her into a brash and cold mother bent on preparing her children to live in a loveless and cruel world.  Hattie’s tribes consist of her eleven children and one granddaughter, and it’s through those tribes that her story unfolds. Each chapter is a focused narrative of one family member, each adding another piece to their family’s puzzle. While the novel’s form is unusual, isn’t this how families (of any size) work? Each tribesman’s story informs/influences the story of the group as a whole.

The Darkest Child, by Delores Phillips (10 kids)
Just because you’re family, it doesn’t mean that you’re all treated the same. Tangy Mae, the 13-year-old protagonist of this novel, knows this better than anyone. Tangy Mae stands out from her 9 siblings and her mother, because of the color of her skin. Her mother, Rozelle, is fair-skinned enough to pass as white, and her siblings are similarly complected. Tangy Mae is different. She has the darkest complexion of the group, which makes her the main target of her unhinged mother’s cruelty. But she’s different in another way, too: she’s smart, really smart, which makes Rozelle’s decision to pull her out of school and force her to start working to support the family that much harder to fathom. Tangy Mae’s steely will is the only thing she has to depend on to not only escape her familial situation, but to find her self-worth in a society (the segregated south in the 1950s) that values whiteness above all else.

Object Lessons, by Anna Quindlen (5 kids)
Oldest children are sort of like explorers without compasses. They’re the ones to go out in the world, experience things, and report back to the rest of us. They don’t have anyone older and—OK, I’ll say it—cooler to look to or listen to about the ways of the world. The protagonist of Quindlen’s first novel, 12-year-old Maggie Scanlan, is this kind of compass-less explorer. She’s got lots of responsibilities at home, which make her seem pretty grown up, but she’s utterly innocent about the world.  This innocence causes trouble for Maggie, the eldest of five children, during a sleepy summer in the suburbs of New York in the early 1960s. As she tries to understand the strained relationship between her father’s family and her mother and navigate her changing relationship with her best friend, Maggie learns some harsh truths about the people she thought she knew best. It’s this knowledge that cracks her shell of innocence and pushes her toward adulthood.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt (6 kids)
Set in a small Mississippi town, this novel dives into the lives of a number of families. Key among them: the Defresnes and the Ratliffs. When 12-year-old Harriet Defresnes decides that she’s going to solve the mystery surrounding her older brother’s death, she quickly figures the Ratliffs to be somehow involved. While we only meet four of the six Ratcliff brothers—two are incarcerated—the forklift stealing, snake handling, meth cooking, taxidermist, pool hall–hustling brothers have enough going on to make up a novel of their own. But the juxtaposition between Harriet’s family, who remain emotionally paralyzed since her brother’s death, and the Ratcliff’s volatile relationships with each other (as well as the other families in town) offers an interesting study in the complexity of family dynamics.

What’s your favorite big family from literature?