Malouf's title story in Dream Stuff (2000) explores the tensions between European and Australian cultures in its focus on a writer returning home to Australia.

Malouf's “At Schindlers,” in the same 2000 collection, contrasts the social and the personal as it chronicles the life of a boy who loses his father during World War II.

Long Day's Journey into Night, first performed in 1956, is Eugene O'Neill's finest study of domestic interaction and offers insight into O'Neill's own tragic relationship with his family.

The narrator in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) explores the lives of his offbeat family in this bittersweet bestselling novel as he tells of his struggle to make peace with them.