Three tragicomedies to make you laugh and cry

Tears of laughter or sadness? Who knows!

I recently had the good luck of being sent an early copy of Rachel Khong’s upcoming novel Real Americans, which is out in April. I’m yet to get round to reading it, but it did remind me of how much I loved Khong’s 2017 debut, Goodbye, Vitamin, which is a short family story that’s both funny and sad.

This got me thinking about how tragicomedy is one of my favourite fiction genres; that when a book can hit that delightfully oxymoronic sweet spot of making me laugh as much as it makes me cry, I am almost guaranteed to end up fervently adoring it. Here are three great ones…

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

Quite literally everything is going wrong for Ruth. At 30 years old, the fact her fiance has fallen for another woman has very much put a spanner in the works of their engagement, her career is stagnating, and then she finds out her father has Alzheimer’s. So, when Ruth goes home for Christmas, she somehow finds herself agreeing to move in for a year to help her mother with the care.

How a novel about heartbreak, ageing and illness can be so sweet and amusing and tender I have no idea, but Goodbye, Vitamin is really such a delight to read.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

The year is 412 BC, and out-of-work Sicilian potters Lampo and Gelon are planning to put on a play. Not just any play, but Greek playwright-du-jour Euripides’ tragedy Medea. So who should they cast in it but the thousands of Athenian men who have been imprisoned in the local quarry since their ill-fated invasion of the island?

Glorious Exploits is an absolute riot of a book. Not only is it blisteringly funny - narrated by Lampo in a modern Irish vernacular with all the wit to match - but in less than 300 pages it manages to pack in so much about war, art, brotherhood, and culminates into something you read with your heart in your throat. Such a gem.

Fight Night by Miriam Toews

When nine-year-old Swiv is expelled from school, she must stay at home with her ailing yet terrifically eccentric and surprisingly vivacious grandmother. Grandma Elvira’s methods of homeschooling are unconventional, to say the least, and she might just be the best older character I have ever read.

Fight Night is a paean to intergenerational relationships and strong women, and I have no idea what I did more while tearing through it: sobbed from sadness or cried with laughter. A very, very, very special book.

And finally…

This week, the longlist for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction was announced. I despair at why, in 2024, it’s so needed - research shows that just 26.5% of non-fiction reviews in national newspapers are allocated to books by female writers, while 35.5% of books awarded a non-fiction prize over the past 10 years have been written by a woman - but it’s great to see something being done about it. The longlist announcement has also come at a good time for me as I’m trying read more nonfiction this year. What would you recommend?