Recommendations
Books Like Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the great American mother-daughter novel
If you loved Terms of Endearment — Aurora Greenway's impossible personality, Emma's marriage and illness, the comedy and tragedy of a mother who loves her daughter too much and too intrusively — these novels share the same emotional territory: complicated female relationships, domestic life's comedy and grief, and the women who survive both.
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Buy on AmazonThe Evening Star
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's direct sequel — Aurora in her late 60s, raising Emma's troubled children; the essential continuation for readers who want to know what becomes of Aurora after the events of Terms of Endearment; the companion in McMurtry's portrait of Aurora across time.
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Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel about a dysfunctional family trying to have one last Christmas together — the most important contemporary companion in American fiction about difficult family relationships; the Lambert family's dysfunction is the contemporary, more extreme version of the Aurora-Emma dynamic.
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Buy on AmazonOrdinary People
by Judith Guest
Guest's debut novel about a family trying to function after a son's accidental death — the Midwestern, more psychologically direct version of the family-under-pressure story; the Jarrett family's breakdown is the companion in American fiction about grief and family dysfunction.
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Buy on AmazonThe Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — three women in different eras, all affected by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; the companion in literary fiction about women's lives and the different forms female aspiration and constraint take.
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Buy on AmazonAnne of Green Gables
by L.M. Montgomery
Montgomery's classic — the companion in the tradition of the irresistible female character whose personality exceeds her circumstances; Anne Shirley is the earlier, Canadian, more innocent version of the personality-as-force that Aurora Greenway represents in Terms of Endearment.
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Buy on AmazonOne True Thing
by Anna Quindlen
Quindlen's novel about a daughter returning home to care for her dying mother — the companion in American fiction about the mother-daughter relationship's complexity; the daughter's account of her mother's dying reverses the perspective of Terms of Endearment to the same emotional territory.
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Buy on AmazonWhite Noise
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about domestic life and the anxiety of illness in the contemporary consumer landscape; the Gladney family's suburban world is the academic, paranoid version of what Terms of Endearment treats in the domestic mode.
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Buy on AmazonOlive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in stories — Olive is a formidable, impossible, loving woman whose personality exceeds her small Maine town; the direct character companion to Aurora Greenway; both women are too much for the worlds they live in, and both are revealed as genuinely loving beneath the impossible surface.
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