I love fiction that immerses us in a character’s mind. It’s plot enough for me—the gyrations of logic or illogic. Characters reasoning, abandoning reason, obsessing. Even when the thoughts lead nowhere, as in Kafka’s The Burrow, there’s something thrilling and cathartic about going along for the ride. And when the narrator is precise and self-aware, we get to understand the characters’ motivations and contradictions truly. The books on this list, two autobiographical, share this quality. At their center are relationships—ones that aren’t going well or didn’t go well. Perfect fodder for analysis. Most of these books revolve around romantic or sexual relationships, while one (Burnt Sugar) proves that mother-daughter bonds can be just as intense. The books’ narrators try to reason methodically through their situations, sometimes sinking deeper into obsession or downward spirals. It’s no coincidence that these books are relatively slim: they are unflinching and raw. The characters brood, swear, cry, study themselves in the mirror crying, invite more sorrow—and keep us turning the pages.

Long-running relationships impress me greatly. People are complicated, and getting along isn’t as easy as it should be, especially with external friction. So it’s no surprise that relationships are at the heart of the twelve stories in my collection, The Confines. Set in the U.S. and India, the collection follows characters navigating the unspoken rules of conservative Indian society—a tension that runs through the stories. Many explore romantic relationships or marriage—an endlessly complex institution made more so by the stigma around divorce, which often clashes with the partners’ desires. Said rules also thwart relationships that could have been epic—though who’s to say? Say you’re growing up in 1990s Bangalore, like a character in one story, and fall deeply in love with a colleague but can’t tell him because girls aren’t supposed to behave like that. What do you do? The stories in The Confines take pains to understand the characters as they converse with each other or try to counsel themselves through fraught situations, like the books on this list.

Here are 7 books about intense, messy relationships:

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

In Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, Antara, a young artist living in Pune, begins to care for her mother, Tara, who is losing her memory. Always a rebel, Tara left her husband when Antara was a little girl for a vagabond life in an ashram and even on the streets briefly. Deeply scarred by her mother’s neglect, Antara tries to stitch a life together and not turn into her mother, while harboring a secret that preserves her pain and resentment. “Is she trying to erase me?” wonders Antara of her mother. Doshi does not hold back in depicting less-than-attractive aspects of the mother-daughter relationship: the ugliness, love, dependence, and the difficulty of healing when trust and boundaries are breached. 

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer

Getting Lost is autobiographical, comprising diary entries from the late 1980s, written during the author’s affair with a Soviet diplomat—the journal becomes her “way of enduring the wait” until they see each other again. The affair is doomed from the start: the author is single, while her lover is married, and she has no control over the direction of their relationship. The diary entries obsessively chronicle their nights together, her frantic calculations about their next meeting, and her fear of losing him—their repetitiousness a clue to the author’s emotional decline.

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein

Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment begins with the sentence, “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me,” spoken to the protagonist, Olga, by her husband, Mario. At first unbelieving, Olga discovers that her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. What follows is an account of how she almost breaks down, trying to handle her responsibilities toward the house and home while consumed by fury and grief. She begins to behave erratically but pulls herself back from the brink through painful introspection. In the end, she accepts that Mario is gone and that she must rebuild her life. Ferrante’s direct, unflinching writing gets to the heart of what it means to feel betrayed and at the breaking point of reason.

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Burton Pike

I cannot resist including this classic, a favorite. In The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe’s first novel—he was twenty-five when he wrote it—Werther, an artist, relocates to the countryside, seeking a simple life close to nature. There, he meets and falls in love with a young woman named Charlotte. “… I’m not able to tell you how she is perfect, why she is perfect; enough, she has taken my whole mind captive,” he writes to his friend Wilhelm, in one letter in the series the novel largely consists of. Lotte is happy to befriend Werther, but she is engaged and does not return his romantic feelings. Unable to accept this, Werther rapidly descends into torment that leads to a fateful and tragic end. Told in language full of feeling, the novel unforgettably portrays the consequences of passion colliding with pragmatism.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Like Getting Lost, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is autobiographical. Told through 240 meditations on the color blue—which the author loves—it’s often classified as poetry. Written between 2003 and 2006, it follows the author as she recovers from an affair with a man referred to as the “prince of blue,” who tells her, one of the last times they meet, that he is in love with another woman, too. Nelson’s grief is devastating, yet coolly dissected through literary and philosophical reflections, written with raw honesty. “Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror,” she writes, ending the book with, “Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you.”

Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey

In Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey follows an unnamed narrator over two decades as she tries to make sense of her life and her often-destructive choices through conversations with strangers, employers, friends, and her mother. Through the confessional, first-person narrative, the reader has a ringside seat to the narrator’s searching thoughts as she alternates between clarity and self-sabotage. The relationship at the center of this book is that of the narrator with herself. Precisely and intelligently, she wrestles with questions of power, desire, and self-deception, realizing at one point, “I have always liked men who are a little cruel.” 

First Love by Gwendoline Riley

In Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Neve is in a volatile, dysfunctional marriage with an older man, Edwyn. She has never lived with anyone before him and comes from an unstable family, particularly her mother. Edwyn, meanwhile, is needy, manipulative, and recovering from a serious illness. They stumble through their marriage, with Neve making excuses for him and wondering, whenever they find a pocket of calm, whether they are “coming to an accommodation, two people who’d always expected, planned, to live their lives alone.” Riley’s sparse, laser-sharp writing makes almost every line of this sad yet improbably funny novel feel underlineable.