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.
What would life look like if all your needs, and the needs of all the people you love, were met?
When we’re juggling a mountain of responsibilities on our own, it feels like there simply isn’t enough time to take care of ourselves, our families, and our to-do lists. And even when we’re partnered and surrounded by friends, we’re often too afraid to ask for help. But to survive today’s age of overwork and precarity, we need to turn to our relationships for the support we need to stay afloat, whether it’s financial, emotional, or otherwise. So why don’t we?
Now, in Kin, Sophie Lucido Johnson explores the social science of friendship and provides the tools to forge kinship: relationships built on mutual care and shared resources that extend beyond the typical nuclear family or casual friendship. Lucido Johnson lays out the steps you need to gain the full, mutual benefits of kin, including being radically honest about your needs and eliminating relationship hierarchies from your life. 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.
Through personal stories and insights from psychologists and sociologists, Kin reveals how to prosper in an increasingly overwhelming and lonely world, that everyone has access to community, and that kin has the power to drastically change our lives for the better.
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.