Release Date:- 2025-10-14
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
An electrifying memoir about the demise of a singular familyāa stunning new book by Gabrielle Hamilton, author of the New York Times bestseller and James Beard Award winner Blood, Bones & Butter
āYou wonāt be able to put down Gabrielle Hamiltonās story of the excitement, resilience, agony, and defiance required to be a member of her family. She doesnāt mess around.āāAriel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply
āWe were a family veined through with certain brutalities, rifts, and unresolved conflicts, as well as some remarkable violences and some decades-long silences. But together we had rituals, systems, congruent cohering events that made us who we were as one. I thought of the black and blue marks as if they were the desirable spores of mold found in noble cheeses.ā
The youngest of five children, Gabrielle Hamilton took pride in her unsentimental, idiosyncratic family. She idolized her parentsā charisma and non-conformity. She worshipped her siblingsā mischievousness and flair. Hers was a family with no fondness for the humdrum.
Hamilton grew up to find enormous success, first as a chef and then as the author of award-winning, bestselling books. But her family ties frayed in ways both seismic and mundane until eventually she was estranged from them all. In the wake of one brotherās sudden death and anotherās suicide, while raising young children of her own, Hamilton was compelled to examine the sprawling, complicated root system underlying her losses. She began investigating her familyās devout independence and individualism with a nearly forensic rigor, soon discovering a sobering warning in their long-held self-satisfaction. By the time she was called to care for her declining motherāthe mother sheād seen only twice in thirty yearsāHamilton had realized a certain freedom, one made possible only through a careful psychological autopsy of her family.
Hamiltonās gift for pungent dialogue, propulsive storytelling, intense honesty, and raucous humor made her first book a classic of modern memoir. In Next of Kin, she offers a keen and compassionate portrait of the people she grew up with and the prevailing but soon-to-falter ethos of the era that produced them. A personal account of one familyās disintegration, Next of Kin is also a universal story of the emotional clarity that comes from scrutinizing our family mythologies and seeing through to the other side.
