How to Be a Family How to Be a Family

How to Be a Family

The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together

    • 4.0 • 12 Ratings
    • $14.99
    • $14.99

Publisher Description

In this "refreshingly relatable" (Outside) memoir, perfect for the self-isolating family, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together.

What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family?
Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together?

In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble.

HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go?

A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.

GENRE
Parenting
RELEASED
2019
September 17
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
336
Pages
PUBLISHER
Little, Brown and Company
SELLER
Hachette Digital, Inc.
SIZE
8.3
MB

More Books by Dan Kois

Vintage Contemporaries Vintage Contemporaries
2023
The World Only Spins Forward The World Only Spins Forward
2018
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Facing Future Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Facing Future
2009
Hampton Heights Hampton Heights
2024

Customers Also Bought

There Are No Grown-ups There Are No Grown-ups
2018
Death in Her Hands Death in Her Hands
2020
Red at the Bone Red at the Bone
2019
The Gifted School The Gifted School
2019
The Heir Affair The Heir Affair
2020
Save Me the Plums Save Me the Plums
2019