Families

by Jane Howard

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Marilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has the single best passage ever- on pg 259. I was reading in bed, half asleep, and sat bolt upright knowing that the passage about balance was the truest, most meaningful statement I'd ever read about life.

"What we all have discovered together, only rarely in classrooms, is that the passage of years guarantees very little in the way of answers, that ambivalence and ambiguity will follow us all the days of our lives, but that words and wit and woods and food and music will endure as sources of comfort.

We have learned that surprises exhilarate, if they don’t barrage us too fast, and that the quest for the proper balances between stillness and motion, restraint and excess, sound and silence, will continue, and that too much freedom—a life too much at large…can feel at least as constricting as too little. We have learned, maybe most importantly of all, to cherish the company of those who can make us laugh, who can forgive us our shortcomings, who can restore to us or evoke in us a feeling of purpose in the face of absurdity."

[Shirley Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book several years ago, and wanted to re-read it to see if it had more meaning for me than it did the first time. Miss Howard visited with several types of families all across the country to find out what a real "family" is. She found may variations and make-up that reached across a wide spectrum of ideas and values that "families" had. Interesting to see what a real "family": basically whatever one wants it to be.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some VERY odd ideas of what makes a family. Interesting.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in 1978. It is non-fiction, which I seldom read. I don't remember the book biut from the description it is going on my reread list.

[Jacqui · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of all time