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PREFACE

kinship is a book that holds the transcripts of five interviews I had with five of my family members. In these interviews I asked each person the same set of questions about their memories and conceptions of family, blood relations, and each other. 

Inspired by many co-authored religious texts, I use a cross-reference system to take each reader on a unique path throughout the book. Rather than read all 800 pages of this book front to back, I encourage you to open it up to a random page and begin reading. As you encounter cross-references that pique your interest, follow them to their respective pages, continue reading, and repeat. 

With this format, I aim to tell the story of a family through parts of a whole, moving readers from one zoomed in moment of family life to the next. I hope this non-linear reading experience can better help tell the complicated and very much non-linear story of kinship. 

Though this book uses my family’s perspectives and experiences, I don’t see this as a book about my family. I hope it can be a documentation of some “universal” experience of kinship: the highs and lows, dramas and mundane moments, connections and contradictions, and visceral experiences of a group of people tied together by blood.