Books like I love Gootie by Max Apple

In this memoir, novelist Anne Roiphe shows us what it was really like to grow up rich and Jewish in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Revisiting the world of her childhood, Roiphe brings alive a cast of characters who are both difficult to love and impossible to forget. Through the eyes of this precocious, loving daughter, we witness the brutalities that lurked behind the mah-jongg tables, cocktail parties, and summer houses of her family. By turns heartbreaking, funny, and mercilessly honest, Roiphe's story exposes the fault lines of misery that exploded in domestic battles on the home front, far overshadowing the war overseas. The locus of the story is 1185 Park Avenue. Amidst the maids and the governesses and the doormen and the psychiatrists live the members of the Roth family, in Apartment 8C. They include an unfaithful father who uses his wife's fortune to entertain other women and play cards at his club; a misfit son who won't eat his food because he believes his parents are trying to poison him; a disappointed mother who waits all day for her five o'clock scotch and her crossword puzzle; and an eager daughter who tries to negotiate peace at the dinner table. Bound by custom and greed, as well as love, they stay together until their world at 1185 Park has done its damage. Only the daughter escapes whole - to become the writer we now know as Anne Roiphe.

Jake, a rebellious boy, enrolls in the quirky Applewhite Family’s Creative Academy, a home‐schooling program in North Carolina, where he discovers unexpected talents and strange pleasures.

A memoir by Joyce Johnson that interweaves her own life as a Broadway child, her marriage to two father‑less artists, and her mother's fragile memories of growing up without a father.

In 1936 Nazi Germany, Max is born into the Lebensborn program and raised to embody the Aryan ideal, yet his path diverges from the Party’s expectations as he grapples with identity and destiny.

A memoir of a young man’s quest to uncover his true identity amid a turbulent upbringing, revolving around five stepfathers and a mother who reinvented herself and her son as American Indians in Echo Park, California.