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.
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.
