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An electrifying memoir about the demise of a singular family—a stunning new book by Gabrielle Hamilton, author of the New York Times bestseller and James Beard Award winner Blood, Bones & Butter.
"We were a family veined through with certain brutalities, rifts, and unresolved conflicts, as well as some remarkable violences and some decades-long silences. But together we had rituals, systems, congruent cohering events that made us who we were as one. I thought of the black and blue marks as if they were the desirable spores of mold found in noble cheeses."
The youngest of five children, Gabrielle Hamilton took pride in her unsentimental, idiosyncratic family. She idolized her parents' charisma and non-conformity. She worshipped her siblings' mischievousness and flair. Hers was a family with no fondness for the humdrum.
Hamilton grew up to find enormous success, first as a chef and then as the author of award-winning, bestselling books. But her family ties frayed in ways both seismic and mundane until eventually she was estranged from them all. In the wake of one brother's sudden death and another's suicide, while raising young children of her own, Hamilton was compelled to examine the sprawling, complicated root system underlying her losses. She began investigating her family's devout independence and individualism with a nearly forensic rigor, soon discovering a sobering warning in their long-held self-satisfaction. By the time she was called to care for her declining mother—the mother she'd seen only twice in thirty years—Hamilton had realized a certain freedom, one made possible only through a careful psychological autopsy of her family.
Hamilton's gift for pungent dialogue, propulsive storytelling, intense honesty, and raucous humor made her first book a classic of modern memoir. In Next of Kin, she offers a keen and compassionate portrait of the people she grew up with and the prevailing but soon-to-falter ethos of the era that produced them. A personal account of one family's disintegration, Next of Kin is also a universal story of the emotional clarity that comes from scrutinizing our family mythologies and seeing through to the other side.
"James Beard Award winner Hamilton serves up a nuanced and nourishing look at her idiosyncratic family...Hamilton is hardly the first writer to find deep sorrow beneath her family's glittering facade, but the vivid detail of her scenes and her rigorous pursuit of the truth feel revelatory. Layered, moving, and funny, this is a must-read."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A nimbly written, alternately dark and hopeful account of dysfunction layered on dysfunction." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Gabrielle Hamilton's Next of Kin is piercing, horrifying, and perversely gorgeous, to name a few of its more prominent attributes. It charts, with almost murderous precision, the myriad ways in which family and fate collide. One rarely gets to use the word "profound," under any circumstances. In its acumen, in its fullness of emotion, in the stunning ferocity of its prose, Next of Kin is profound." —Michael Cunningham, New York Times bestselling author of The Hours and Day
"Starts with a sandwich and works its way through the small-print menu of the heart. A story to fill you up and with plenty to take home ... I loved it." —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
This information about Next of Kin was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Melissa Hamilton
Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York's East Village and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur, House Beautiful, and Food & Wine. She has also authored the 8-week Chef column in The New York Times, and her work has been anthologized in eight volumes of Best Food Writing. She has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and the Food Network, among other TV and she has won a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef NYC. She currently lives in Manhattan with her two sons.
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