Next of Kin

A Memoir

By: Gabrielle Hamilton

Narrated by: Gabrielle Hamilton

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.

Engaging & Entertaining

I found this to be highly engaging, interesting, and entertaining. I appreciate an author read memoir and I enjoy the genuine insight into another person’s life experience. I didn’t know anything about Gabrielle before reading/listening to this, but I think this is more a human experience story than anything. It was well articulated and sometimes relatable, particularly to growing up in the 70s/80s, the wild dynamic of siblings, and our understanding of family members as individuals. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Stunning memoir

Heartbreakingly raw and honest. A tour de force of a memoir equal parts a reflection on family dysfunction and reckoning.

Not a story I had hoped for...

I have idolized Gabrielle Hamilton and her writing since I read her first book Blood, Bones & Butter in July 2012... I listen to her read it once a year. She is one of my favorite authors. This book wasn't quite what I expected. I don't think I have the right to expect anything of her really... I just hoped she'd share more of the sweet relationship with her sons... more how her relationship with her husband came to a close and maybe how her latest started. Where was the sweetness that was a prized part of that first book? I can't find it.. The writing is always great but where is the story? and the relatable moments where she reached in the freezer for a coke and it burned going down or when she ate a simple boiled potato abroad and it fed her like nothing else... I miss this person.. she always picked up her babies when they cried in the night... someone I feel like I knew and who I really wanted to catch up with... I read this book and I still miss her.
This book is mostly about her brother Jeffery and how and why he committed suicide... The details are pretty graphic at times...