Next of Kin: A Memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton ISBN 9780399590108, 0399590102, B0DQSFWQ86 instant download

Next of Kin: A Memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton ISBN 9780399590108, 0399590102, B0DQSFWQ86 instant download

"You won’t be able to put down Gabrielle Hamilton’s story of the excitement, resilience, agony, and defiance required to be a member of her family. She doesn’t mess around."—Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply

"We 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."

The youngest of five children, Gabrielle Hamilton took pride in her unsentimental, idiosyncratic family. She idolized her parents’ charisma and non-conformity. She worshipped her siblings’ 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 brother’s sudden death and another’s 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 family’s 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 mother—the mother she’d seen only twice in thirty years—Hamilton had realized a certain freedom, one made possible only through a careful psychological autopsy of her family.

Hamilton’s gift for pungent dialogue, propulsive storytelling, intense honesty, and raucous humor made her f