Kin
The Future of Family
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Discover a transformative reframing of intimate relationships with practical steps to build community and combat the loneliness epidemic in this bold and warmhearted blend of memoir and social science in the vein of When You Care and Big Friendship.
Doesn’t it seem like there simply isn’t enough time to take care of ourselves, our families, and our to do lists? Even when we’re partnered and surrounded by friends, we’re often too afraid of burdening others to ask for help. So how do we survive today’s age of overwork and stress, and who can we turn to for the support we need to stay afloat?
Now, writer and cartoonist Sophie Lucido Johnson offers a radical answer to our age of overwhelm in Kin. With richly reported stories and insights from psychology and sociology, Lucido Johnson explores the importance of our closest relationships (beyond the nuclear family) and provides the tools to forge kinship: relationships built on emotional support, physical care, and shared resources. From asking for help on a grocery run, to choosing to have roommates later in life to combat loneliness, to living in modern day “mommunes” of single mothers sharing bills and responsibilities, Kin shows the vast range of kinship structures she and others are thriving in—and how to build your own community of support.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers can find refuge from today's world of "near-constant tragedy and disaster" in a fortifying network of close relationships, according to this thought-provoking study from cartoonist Lucido Johnson (Many Love). Contending that the nuclear family is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of the modern world, she proposes a more expansive notion of "kinships," relationships that "blur the line between friend and family" and "benefit the lives of all people from all backgrounds." Examples include neighbors gathering to make a community meal and unrelated adults sharing in childcare. Lucido Johnson offers strategies for forming kinships, as well as for setting boundaries and dealing with rejection when a friend refuses to help. She backs up her argument with studies that point to loneliness as a possible cause for declines in mental and physical health. But in framing kinship as the way of the future, she overlooks a number of similar past experiments—such as hippie communes in North America and Europe in the 1960s and the communal childcare and housing reforms in the USSR starting in the 1920s—the results of which now seem less than ideal. Still, it's an intriguing perspective on what makes a family. Illus.
