I’m here with a very important book list that could have easily been co-authored by everyone in my main group chat: queer books featuring mommy issues! Gays really are out here having complicated relationships with our mothers and then writing whole books about it.

For the purposes of this list, I’m working off of an expansive definition of “mommy issues,” not limiting us to only the Oedipal interpretation of the term or only featuring books with age gap relationships (that could be its whole own list!). There are many ways to have mommy issues, and what the books on this list ultimately have in common is a complicated, often conflict-laden mother-child dynamic. The titles include nonfiction as well as fiction, and the mommy issues range in scope and intensity. Primarily memoirs and literary fiction are featured, since including romance felt like opening a whole massive canon of mommy issues.

Fellow fan of mommy issues art Drew Burnett Gregory has been tapped for some of the brief blurbs below. Many of the books also have linked Autostraddle reviews in the blurbs because, apparently, our team loves to review books with mommy issues, which surely says nothing at all about us.

This list was originally published in April 2024 and has been updated for Mother’s Day 2025.

Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Self-serious Sadie has never really liked her wild Berkley women’s studies professor mother, Celine, a dynamic which becomes uhhhh a lot more complicated when Celine starts sleeping with Sadie’s longtime best friend Alice. Alice Sadie Celine covers decades and alternates perspectives between the titular characters.

Good Girl by Aria Aber

God I love when poets write novels!! In this one, protagonist Nila is wholly consumed by the grief of losing her mother, a character who while not technically physically present takes up so much space in this novel, which follows Nila into the underbelly of Berlin’s art and techno underground.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Between Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, Bechdel’s oeuvre is the pinnacle of filial investigation. In this graphic memoir, she zeroes in on her mother and her mother’s artistic ambitions, yielding a poignant and humorous work of mother-daughter storytelling.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

If it seems like we include Zami on a lot of lists here at Autostraddle, it’s because it really is such an important fixture of lesbian literary canon. In it, Lorde traces the lineage of women who have shaped her life, including her mother, who appears throughout the genre-defying work of personal writing. The end in particular provides a striking portrait of her mother’s strength.

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Dí­az

Dí­az’s memoir is a gorgeously lyrical exploration of Puerto Rican history, the author’s personal struggles with mental health and depression, and a complicated and often violent relationship between Díaz and her mother, who has schizophrenia. In an interview with LA Times, Díaz said the following about these parts of the book: “My story wasn’t unique — somewhere there is a teenage girl with a mother who suffers from mental illness and addiction, just trying to get through the day. Maybe seeing herself in this book will make life a little bit easier.”

Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks

Casey Parks simultaneously digs into her own family history as well as the lost history of a trans stranger named Roy in Diary of a Misfit, a stunning work of nonfiction on queer life. She digs into her fraught relationship with her mother, who initially shuns her for being gay.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s lyrical debut novel is structured as a letter from a first generation Vietnamese American son to his single mother who cannot read. The letter digs into his mother’s history and his memories, painting an intimate and breathtaking portrait of mother and son against the backdrops of the Vietnam War and its lasting impact, the American opioid crisis, and more.

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

City of Laughter concerns four generations of women, so there are multiple combinations of fraught mother-daughter relationships in this book about the silences and secrets kept within families.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett

Version 1.0.0

I am biased here as I’m married to the author, but my wife Kristen Arnett’s entire oeuvre is filled to the brim with mommy issues (and, in the case of her debut novel Mostly Dead Things, combination mommy/daddy issues). Her second novel With Teeth is arguably a mommy issues book in that it’s about bad gay moms. But her most mommy issues book to date is her recent third novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, in which clown protagonist Cherry is gay and also has a gay mom. She also has a thing for MILFs and pursues a much older magician Mommi named Margot the Magnificent.

Ma and Me by Putsata Reang

In her searing memoir Ma and Me, Reang wrestles with her desires to be a good Cambodian daughter and her queerness, constantly at odds with her mother’s expectations.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

A true classic in the lesbian mommy issues literary canon!

Memorial by Bryan Washington

While I’ve focused mainly on mother-daughter dynamics on this list, gay men of course have their fair share of mommy issues, too, and one of the protagonists of Memorial, Benson, finds himself in a strange living situation when his boyfriend Mike leaves the country and his boyfriend’s mother Mitsuko moves in.

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Like all of Broder’s work, this is a freaky little book with sentences that’ll make you laugh til you choke. Milk Fed is about Rachel, who inherits a calorie counting obsession from her mother, from whom her therapist encourages a detox from. Rachel becomes obsessed with Miriam, who works the counter at the froyo shop Rachel frequents. For Autostraddle, Kate Gorton writes: “This book has everything: lesbian sex, mommy issues, eating disorders, frozen yogurt, plus-size golems, Jewish mysticism, weirdly specific fantasies about coworkers, a fat chick as the love interest, and a whole lot more.”

We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart

Not every age gap lesbian relationship is a product of mommy issues, but in Michelle Hart’s beautifully layered We Do What We Do in the Dark, that’s at least part of the genesis. Ostensibly a book about an affair, the novel finds its greatest moments in flashbacks between the protagonist and both her own mom and the mom of her best friend. – Drew Burnett Gregory

Native Country of the Heart by Cherríe Moraga

This memoir touches on so many threads of Moraga’s life and Mexican American diaspora and is ultimately at its heart a mother-daughter story. By telling her mother Elvira’s story, Moraga excavates so many layered histories.

Exalted by Anna Dorn

Middle-aged lesbian and bad mom Dawn, one of the two chaotic and unreliable protagonists of Exalted, likes sleeping with younger women and self-sabotaging in spectacular ways. Here is a mommy issues novel from the perspective of the mother.

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

I am truly obsessed with this novel about a Palestinian American queer woman navigating love addiction and her queerness. The title actually comes from something the mother in the novel says to the daughter. The protagonist often engages in affairs that scream mommy issues.

A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins

A Good Happy Girl is more overtly a daddy issues novel, the protagonist’s distant relationship with her mother rumbles underneath the surface of every moment. After all, some gays simply have parent issues, and this gay deals with that by entering a complicated throuple with an older woman and her wife. – Drew Burnett Gregory

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Here’s another classic in the literary canon of fraught mother-daughter dynamics, Allison’s beloved novel and portrait of the American South centers young girl Bone, who has an abusive stepfather and complicated relationship with her mother Anney, who had her out of wedlock as a young teen.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Dennis-Benn’s debut novel tells the stories of two sisters and their mothers, three Jamaican women. Delores is a complicated mother to both sisters but especially to queer protagonist Margot. A case could also be made for Dennis-Benn’s Patsy making this list, too.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson is the only author with the distinguished honor of being on this list twice, and that feels right. Her memoir details her journey to find her biological mother.

Matricide by Carla Tomaso

The title says it all. Many queer books may dabble in mommy issues, but Carla Tomaso’s underread Matricide makes them its primary subject. Read it to laugh, read it to cry, read it to get turned on, and read it to think hmm I guess my mom isn’t that bad. – Drew Burnett Gregory

And what a note to end on! Literal matricide! This is far from an exhaustive list, so feel free to shout out your favorite queer mommy issues books in the comments!

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!