Misery loves company, so perhaps that is why I enjoy reading about families who have a good wallow in weirdness. This genre may be from many eras and cultures, but I tend to enjoy stories taking place in the good old here and now.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is my favorite. The Lambert family is certifiable, but not so out there as to be unrealistic. I loved The Condition by Jennifer Haigh, which attracted me because the title referred to a medical condition that affected one of the family's children (and by extension the rest of the family). Any novel by Meg Wolitzer is going to have some zany family fun. The parents in The Position are sex therapists who write a best-selling marriage manual in the free-and-easy '70s. You can imagine how their kids turn out.
Not a novel, but an incredible memoir of some way wacked-out parents is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Jeannette was one of four children who pretty much had to raise themselves because the parents, though creative and intelligent, refused to buy in to bourgeois society by having jobs or doing much of anything responsible. The truth is truly stranger than fiction.
And compared to these characters, I'm not doing so badly after all.
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