How to Be a Family, Dan Kois
How to Be a Family, Dan Kois
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How to Be a Family
The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together

Author: Dan Kois

Narrator: Dan Kois

Unabridged: 10 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/17/2019

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

In this "refreshingly relatable" (Outside) memoir, perfect for the self-isolating family, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together.

What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family?
Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together?

In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble.

HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go?

A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.

About Dan Kois

Dan Kois is a writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where his work has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and two Writers Guild Awards. He’s the author of the novel Vintage Contemporaries; How to Be a Family, a memoir; The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler), which was a 2019 Stonewall Honor Book; and Facing Future, a book of music criticism and biography. He is a frequent guest and host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast, was a founding host of Slate’s Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast, and hosts The Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis. He grew up in Milwaukee, where his first job was delivering the Milwaukee Sentinel, and now lives with his family in Virginia.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tisha on October 05, 2019

I like the premise..... But I see no way to truly integrate into communities and learn from their different parenting styles in 12 weeks. I guess I should be talking to my neighbors who moved to Scotland for a year so the husband could continue his education. Or my college friend who packed up her kid......more

Goodreads review by Melanie on September 08, 2020

I thought the concept was interesting, however, I do not believe the Kois family spent enough time in any place to really determine the best way of life. Many reviews talked about the author being elite and smug, and it really seemed like the only take-away from his year away from the Beltway was ri......more

Goodreads review by Laura Dye on October 11, 2019

Had no intention of reading, much less buying, this book until I heard the author read a chapter aloud on one of my favorite podcasts. (Mom and dad are fighting) The existential crisises he spoke about were so relatable that I immediately bought the book. Loved it. Smart and funny, shares the kids p......more

Goodreads review by Katelyn on May 08, 2019

Dan Kois and his wife Alia Smith realized their lives in Arlington, VA were overworked and over stressed. Both worked long hours, their kids attended a high achieving/high pressure school and they battled about screen time. They decided to take a year and live in different places to see how others l......more


Quotes

New York Times' Best Holiday Books of 2019New York Post's Awesome Books for the HolidaysBookpage's Best Lighthearted Nonfiction of 2019A BookRiot New Nonfiction Release to Add to Your NightstandIncluded in Buzzfeed's Holiday Gift GuideFeatured in Entertainment Weekly's Best Holiday Books

"Borrows a page from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love....this book is an antidote to the documentarian approach that now pervades much travel writing."—Monica Drake, New York Times Book Review

"This book shows how one family works, as a way of helping us all ask ourselves: How might (and ought) our own families best function? ... Discuss this book with people you care about, who also care about you. "—Los Angeles Times

"Kois is a self-aware, menschy, and amusing guide to this adventure, picking apart what you can leave behind, what you can pick up along the way, and what will follow you wherever you are."—Vogue

"A hilarious and honest book about how wherever you (and your kids) go, there you (and their screens) are."
Real Simple

"An impressive body of research."—The New York Times

"An illuminating story of family connection in the digital age."—Entertainment Weekly


"Kois and his family actually take the dizzying leap to leave behind their lives for a year-a trek that takes them from New Zealand to Kansas-and the result is a unique book that every overstressed and anxious (meaning = every) parent should read."
The Millions

"Kois, an editor at Slate, made a project of exploring what living in other cultures-in this case, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Kansas-could teach [his family] about becoming closer. The result is his heartwarming memoir."—The Washingtonian

"Might remind cinema-minded readers of the end of Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero...nicely tuned-in observations befitting a keen-eyed journalist."—Kirkus