In 'Families' Jane Howard informally visits many dozens of families
and tries to discover what makes the best ones work so well.
Families are not dying, she finds, although they are evolving in
various ways. From the tightest-knit nuclear family or extended
clan to the most fragile new commune, the family in one guise or
another remains everybody's most basic hold on reality. We may run
away from our families as many do, but no sooner do we escape than
we find another one, often very much like it. Sympathetically, with
immense thrust, she crosses the continent to discover families'
myths, jokes, and rituals. She leafs through their scrapbooks, sits
on their porches, and takes part, when she can, in their feasts and
celebrations. She talks to a father of eighteen, several double
first cousins, stepchildren, multiple godmothers, an honorary
relative of an Indian tribe, and a nine-year-old boy who has no
family but his mother. She sits with a matriarch on the front stoop
of a ghetto house, goes camping with a family in Mexico, has
Thanksgiving with another in Iowa, and orders pizza with a Greek
clan in Massachusetts. Howard reports on visits to conventional
Southern and Jewish households and to innovative ones whose
members, lacking a common history, plan on building common futures
as if water were after all as thick as blood. She examines the
notion that "there are ways and ways of achieving kinship, of which
birth and marriage are only the most obvious." Millions of clans
and families all over the United States continue to celebrate,
quarrel, disband, reunite, and endure. Jane Howard makes us realize
how our lives are interwoven both with the families we are born
into and with those we invent as we go through life. 'Families' is
compassionate, provocative, and profound. The paperback edition of
this important work will be essential reading for all those with an
interest in the study of familial bonds, particularly sociologists,
anthropologists, and psychologists.
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