Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle. Watching the parents marriage start to fall apart and how Paddy slowly transitions from the carefree experience of childhood to anxiety, fear, anger, and sadness as it becomes clear to him what’s happening. And also sensing how alienating it was to be the kid with parents who were on the verge of divorce.

All of my classmates (I went to a very small school in a very small town) were shocked when my parents were the ones to get divorced. My parents had shielded us from a lot of their problems and so there was such a bizarre shift in my family from one spectrum to the other once it started to happen. This book has stuck with me for that reason.