The Family Outing
A Memoir
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3.9 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Fascinating, funny, and wise, The Family Outing is an affirmation to all of us who know the pain and shame of hiding our truest self, and a stirring invitation into the courage, freedom, and joy of living our whole truth.”—Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed, founder of Together Rising
A striking and remarkable literary memoir about one family’s transformation, with almost all of them embracing their queer identities.
Jessi Hempel was raised in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. But the truth was far from perfect. Her father was constantly away from home, traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Growing up, Jessi and her two siblings struggled to make sense of their family, their world, their changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. And each, in their own way, was hiding their true self from the world.
By the time Jessi reached adulthood, everyone in her family had come out: Jessi as gay, her sister as bisexual, her father as gay, her brother as transgender, and her mother as a survivor of a traumatic experience with an alleged serial killer. Yet coming out was just the beginning, starting a chain reaction of other personal revelations and reckonings that caused each of them to question their place in the world in new and ultimately liberating ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of this eloquent, intricately woven debut is the first in her family to come out as queer, but she's not the last. As journalist Hempel explains, a series of family interviews during the pandemic revealed her life was founded on a web of "hidden truths." Her father, raised Christian, lived a double life for decades, until Hempel's sister discovered their dad had been furtively courting other men online. Their mother, Patti, harbored a weighty secret of her own: As a teenager, she was close with a man who, unbeknownst to her, was an accomplice to the notorious Ypsilanti Slayer. Alienated from her distant husband, Patti fell into bouts of severe depression that, for years, kept Hempel and her younger sisters—both of whom would later have their own coming out (one as bisexual, the other as a trans man)—"afraid that honesty break her." Hempel's work has an urgent, intimate feel as she documents her family's unraveling and eventual rebuilding: "Coming out is the act of letting go of our planned lives in pursuit of the lives that wait for all of us." Of course, it's hardly that easy: Old wounds fester, and new troubles arrive, but what rises from the rubble is a deeply moving portrait of generational trauma and painstaking repair. This interrogation of familial fissures and bonds radiates with empathy and grace.
