In her long-awaited new memoir, the author of the New York Times bestseller and James Beard Award winner Blood, Bones & Butter tells the “raw and darkly humorous” (People) story of her family's unexpected dissolution.
“Hamilton’s voice is as singular and rollicking as ever in Next of Kin, but it feels rare and special to have it applied to the kind of complicated family history that so many of us only come to confront in adulthood (if at all).”—Vogue
“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.
About the Author
Gabrielle Hamilton is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blood, Bones & Butter, which won the James Beard Foundation’s award for Writing and Literature, and the cookbook Prune. She is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York City’s East Village. Hamilton received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan and contributed to the monthly “Eat” column for The New York Times Magazine for five years. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, and House Beautiful.
Praise For…
“The celebrity chef’s raw and darkly humorous memoir explores her family’s demise and reconstruction—through divorce, estrangements, a brother’s sudden death and another’s suicide.”—People
“James Beard Award winner [Gabrielle Hamilton] focuses on her own incredible, complicated clan, examining what made her so thrilled as a child to be part of this singular clan and what, later in life, wrenched them all apart.”—Town & Country
“Hamilton’s voice is as singular and rollicking as ever in Next of Kin, but it feels rare and special to have it applied to the kind of complicated family history that so many of us only come to confront in adulthood (if at all).”—Vogue
“What Next of Kin is really about, much more than Blood, Bones & Butter, is the debt we owe to family and the claim they make on us. [It] demands an awed respect. It’s a naked, deboning sort of family accounting.”—GrubStreet
“You won’t be able to put down Gabrielle Hamilton’s story of the excitement, resilience, agony, and defiance required to be a member of her family. She doesn’t mess around. In her singular, lyrical style, Hamilton has given us nothing less than an exploration of death, love, and the meaning of life.”—Ariel Levy, New York Times bestselling author of The Rules Do Not Apply
“Gabrielle Hamilton has crafted a shimmering and achingly beautiful exploration of family—those bonds that forge us, the secrets that define us, and the what-ifs that haunt us long after we think we’ve moved on. This is a book that will burrow deep into your heart and stay there, the way family does.”—Michael Hainey, New York Times bestselling author of After Visiting Friends
“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?
“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
