What happens when two adults and their two daughters ditch their suburban Washington, D.C., life and spend a year living in four spots around the world? Writer Dan Kois and his family spent 2017 in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Kansas. We had some questions about his entertaining account of this year, How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together.

Was it hard picking the four destinations of your journey? Did you seriously consider any other options?

We considered scores of other options! Just off the top of my head I remember Argentina, France, Scotland, Japan, Senegal, Tahiti, Iceland, Sweden, Italy, China, India and of course Canada (both Québec and British Columbia). It was extremely difficult! We spent a lot of time researching countries, talking to friends with connections to those countries and thinking about what would be best not only for our family but also for the book I hoped to write. We wanted to find places we actually wanted to go but that also had real, tangible differences from our East Coast suburban lives—places that had things to teach us.

You write that practically everyone asks, “Why Kansas?” Did you decide early on that one leg of your journey would be in the United States?

No, it was up in the air until the very end. But it did seem to me that I had to seriously consider the idea that it would be pretty facile to write a book about trying to look beyond our American parenting without acknowledging that there are plenty of American parents whose lives don’t resemble ours at all. In the end, I was convinced by our friend Catherine’s declaration that if we moved to Kansas, “we’d be so bored, but we’d be so happy.” I called her bluff and moved two blocks away from her.

Now that some time has passed, do you have a favorite moment from this grand adventure? Or a least favorite moment, for that matter?

I think the goodbye party our friends and neighbors threw in Island Bay, New Zealand, is right up there. It was kind of a perfect night that had the added joy of being so obviously the perfect final scene for that section of the book that I felt through the entire evening great personal and professional fulfillment.

The least favorite moment I wrote about was Lyra’s awful experience in her Dutch school, which was basically my fault. That sucked. The least favorite moment I didn’t write about was, after a 17-hour flight, having an armed guard at the Dubai airport pull me aside, open my gigantic suitcase, remove every single thing from it and finally pull from inside a shoe the weed grinder I’d bought in Wellington on Cuba Street (which I hadn’t even ground any weed in yet!!!!) and sternly tell me, “We don’t do this here.”

You and your wife did an enormous amount of planning before you left. What were the most unexpected difficulties you ran into? Did you have any truly unforeseen surprises?

It was so difficult working out schools for our kids! We knew we didn’t want to homeschool or send our kids to private schools. We wanted to experience the public schools in each country. In New Zealand, it required applying for a very specific kind of visa, for which my publisher had to write me a letter of recommendation promising I was not taking any New Zealand jobs while we lived there. In the Netherlands, I spoke to a solid half-dozen people up the bureaucratic chain until I was actually talking to, like, the deputy minister of education, who told me all about an exciting pilot program in Dutch/English bilingual schooling happening at a school in Delft, and then it turned out he was totally wrong and our kids ended up at a school where no one spoke English to them at all. I sure didn’t foresee that.

Also, there were no Airbnbs in Hays, Kansas.

Biking in the Netherlands seemed treacherous at first, but you and your family ended up loving it. Surprisingly, the Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. Are you still biking without a helmet back in the U.S.?

I sure am! I try to ride big, with the self-confidence of a tall, handsome Dutchman. I take up a lot of space on the road and ignore impatient drivers as they pile up behind me. Eventually, one of them will run me over, teaching me a valuable lesson about cultural differences.

Two of the biggest joys of your book are your humor and honesty. Did your family have any editing power over what you included? Your oldest daughter, after all, noted, “I do not entirely dislike my father’s portrayal of me but think that it’s inaccurate in some ways.”

Lyra, my eldest, did indeed insist upon reading the book and giving notes. I resisted this quite a bit and then, much to my surprise, took pretty much all her notes. My wife also read the book and offered many great suggestions but made only one heartfelt plea: “Please do not include your salary in this book.” So I didn’t.

Were you often taking notes? Did your family ever peer over your shoulder or deem anything strictly off limits?

My kids were really aware, throughout the trip, that reporting—the work of interviewing and note-taking—was happening, and that this was a book in the making. They made many recommendations about moments that should or should not go into the book, people I should talk to, stories I should tell. I found that really rewarding, honestly, for them to be intimately involved in this thing that’s always been important to me. I don’t think they exactly understood my job before, but after a year spent seeing me do it in all kinds of different ways (not only for this book but for The World Only Spins Forward, which Isaac and I were writing as I traveled), they really get it now.

If you were to make such a trip again, what things might you change?

We’d incorporate our children much more into the planning. One real lesson of our sometimes-disastrous Dutch sojourn was how much more buy-in we’d have had from them if they’d had the chance to participate in the initial discussions. It took them a long time to view the trip as something all four of us were doing together, not something we were doing to them.

Also, we would be rich, so we could afford to go to Costa Rica during the dry season.

You really loved certain brands of crackers in New Zealand and Costa Rica. What other treats did you discover? Any new recipes you continue to make?

I cook a mean arroz con pollo, and my rice-and-beans game is very on point. And thanks to World Market, we always have hagelslag—Dutch chocolate sprinkles—in the cabinet for special breakfast occasions.

What advice do you have for other families considering such an adventure?

My advice is to do it! It doesn’t have to be this exact adventure, it doesn’t have to be a whole year long, it doesn’t have to skip around the globe. But if you’ve long wanted to take an adventure, take it. Your kids will be fine (I mean, they will be bad sometimes, but that’s OK). The experience of being together through something real, difficult and astonishing will absolutely make up for whatever math classes they miss.

What did each of you miss most about home?

Alia: “Our Diet Coke machine. And our friends.”

Harper: “Our house and the things in our house.”

Lyra: “The stability. Knowing everyone, knowing our school, knowing that everything would be manageable.”

Dan: “Our friends and Washington Nationals games on local TV.”

Do you see life in Arlington, Virginia, in a different light now that you’ve had this experience?

I think so. I think all of us have a much better sense of the place we all have in the world, the infinite other ways of life out there. That’s really gratifying. It helps me obsess a lot less about our neighbors’ intense Sports Parenting, or enormous McMansions, or status comparisons in general. Not that I’m immune to obsessing, of course. But I think I have dialed it down.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How to Be a Family.

Author photo credit: Alia Smith

What comes to mind when you picture a mother? For many people, the concept of motherhood, and by extension of a family, is associated with whiteness. We spoke with Nefertiti Austin about her memoir, Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America, the reality of Black women looking to publicly adopt and how she settled into her identity as a Black mother without appeasing societal or cultural expectations.

Your book discusses not only your personal experience of becoming a single parent but the absence of positive representation of Black motherhood. How can Black motherhood be a radical act?

The fact that Black women continue to pursue motherhood despite our history in America is definitely a radical act. Brought here in chains, we were property and so were our children, but we persevered. Even when we were denied access to our kids or forced to nurse and nurture white children, we created a village of grandparents, elders, siblings, neighbors and friends who became family to keep our kids safe. At every juncture, we have laid claim to our offspring, whether or not we gave birth to them, knowing that slavery, segregation, discrimination, criminalization, sexism, homophobia, racism and erasure are no match for a Black mom’s love. 

What is the most surprising thing you learned about yourself while on the journey to adopt your son, August? How was this self-revelation different from your experience adopting your daughter, Cherish?

Before becoming a mother, I never considered giving up my free-spirited ways. I was accustomed to coming and going as I pleased, but once the decision to adopt took hold, I realized that I was ready for a more routine-driven existence. Overnight, my life expanded to include carpool, sports and family time; and I was good with that. When my daughter came along, she easily blended into the mix.

One of Toni Morrison’s many nuggets of wisdom includes the quote, “The very serious function of racism . . . is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” How do racism and, by extension, the white gaze prevent Black mothers from simply being mothers?

Though Black motherhood has often been diminished, we are still mothers. Racism makes our jobs harder because it adds another layer of stress and worry about the emotional and physical safety of our children, but it doesn’t stop us from teaching our kids to tie their shoes. We are primarily focused on loving and caring for our families and less concerned with the white gaze, unless it interferes with their welfare. Then, you will hear from us.

What was the most challenging part of writing your memoir? Did having a blog make it easier to assemble and write a full-length book?

The most challenging part of writing my memoir was being vulnerable. In order to share my story and convey the sensitivity that I feel as a Black mother raising Black children in America, I had to shed layers. I had to remove my academic hat and be open to divulge how I felt different from my peers as a child, to discuss my father’s persistent incarceration and accept that I didn’t know my mother in an intimate sense.

I definitely thought my now-defunct blog, Mommiejonesing, would make writing my memoir a breeze. I had assembled a lot of articles written by others and myself on the subject of race, motherhood and adoption. I was armed with information but no feelings beyond outrage and disgust. Plus, I was writing from a distance, and that would have kept the reader from understanding the problem of erasing Black mothers from the parenting canon. In the end, much of what I blogged about did not make it into the book.

Your book opens with you taking 5-year-old August to a Black Lives Matter rally. You discuss the very real mixture of fear and anxiety that comes with being a mother to a young Black boy in America. How does white privilege contribute to and sustain the accelerated loss of innocence for Black children?

White privilege gifts white children with a shield that blots out the ugliness of the world. They get to be kids, where mistakes are encouraged and then forgiven. They get to live moment to moment without fear that someone hates/fears/despises them because of their race. This is the power of white privilege.

Simultaneously, Black parents do not have the luxury of not teaching our children about the perniciousness of racism and how, despite best efforts, microagressions and random acts of discrimination will come their way. Our children learn to code switch (act one way with us and another way with whites) and what to do if detained by the police or surveilled by merchants—early. These lessons—i.e., innocence-snatchers—occur as early as 5 years old, because white privilege perpetuates a system with the deck stacked against us. These are our gifts to Black children to keep them safe.

In the chapter “Building My Village,” you write, “It had never occurred to me that there was an expectation for little boys to adhere to a specific masculine salutation.” How does the myth of Black hypermasculinity work in conjunction with toxic masculinity? And how can it finally become obsolete?

Personal and emotional safety is a huge issue in our community. Showing fear can be death in some spaces, so emotion or affection between men is not promoted. However, expecting boys to remain in a man box, where not showing emotion or admitting to hurt and acting like nothing touches them, is heralded as masculine and is extremely problematic. It is toxic and a recipe for a shortened life, troubled relationships and mental illness. Plus, it plays into the stereotype of the hypermasculine Black man who needs to be put down by force. We saw this in the case of Rodney King.

As long as systemic racism, mass incarceration, gangs, drugs, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, poor health, undiagnosed PTSD and undereducation prevail where the opposite is true for their white counterparts, Black toxic masculinity isn’t going anywhere.

One of the most pervasive stereotypes about Black women is the “Strong Black Woman.” In the chapter “Got My Sea Legs,” you say, “More than one friend commented that I made parenting look easy, but part of the reason I was exploring on my blog how Black women were faring as mothers was because I was feeling the weight of trying to do everything myself.” For Black mothers, especially single Black mothers, how is there power in the decision to be vulnerable?

Self-care is empowering, and we have to give ourselves permission to ask for help. We are so used to doing everything ourselves that we don’t know how to ask for help or we think that being vulnerable is a sign of weakness or admission that single motherhood was a mistake. So we put pressure on ourselves to just handle things and succumb to the societal pressure of being all things to everybody. Most women, regardless of race, take care of the children, elders and work. It’s too much, and the reality is that Black women’s mental and physical health are taking a nosedive. Heart attacks, autoimmune diseases, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are taking their toll on us in a big way. We suffer when we don’t take care of ourselves or each other.

How can a sense of community benefit adoptive parents? How does it shape the identity of a foster or adopted child?

Adoption communities offer a safe space for families and children. Here, we do not need to prepare an explanation for why we chose adoption. It is understood that we wanted to become parents and viewed adoption as a natural path to achieve that goal.

Kids who spend time with other kids who are adopted see their experience as normal. Among kindred spirits, they can safely share how it feels to be the only adopted child in their class, or how they met their first parents and it went well or didn’t go well. In these spaces, they do not carry the burden of explaining why they don’t look like their (adoptive) parents or why they do look like their parents but are adopted. It frees them to enjoy life as part of a special club.

How do you think the definition of a family has changed in recent years? How has the idea of a “traditional” family excluded marginalized people, especially single Black mothers?

Modern American women are free to define and create family on their terms. We have moved away from believing that a nuclear family—father, mother, 2.5 kids and a dog—is the only way to be a family. Women are less likely to be shamed for having a job or wanting to stay at home with their children. The definition of family has even expanded to include single moms, adoptive families, LGBTQIA family configurations, kinship family dynamics and mixed-raced couples.

Depending on the socioeconomics of a community, sometimes the traditional paradigm of a family was not modeled or available due to poverty, racism, incarceration, unemployment, homelessness, etc. Also, many Black families are multigenerational, with grandparents or other relatives on hand to support the entire household. Our nontraditional familial configurations deem us marginal by mainstream standards, even when we do not.

In the case of white women willing to go it alone and bring a child into the world without a partner, she is often described as badass in mainstream culture. This nod to the independence of white women does not always extend to poor women or women of color. The reason is simple. Black mothers exist at the bottom of the racialized motherhood totem pole, as we are still saddled with negative stereotypes if we’re thought of at all. There are obvious exceptions—Michelle Obama and Serena Williams come to mind—but these ladies are married and have the means to provide stable homes for their families. Single Black women who pursue nontraditional paths to parenthood receive a side-eye from Blacks and whites. It is assumed that homes headed by single Black mothers are poorer, less intellectually stimulating and a breeding ground for children who are prone to delinquency. This racist characterization of single Black mothers suggests that our kids don’t stand a chance.   

What has been your favorite Mother’s Day to date?

Mother’s Day 2014 was my hands down favorite because it was the first Mother’s Day I had with both kids. Their godfather and a close friend made brunch: salmon croquettes and waffles, two things I don’t normally eat. No one bothered to ask if I liked either dish, but the effort let me know that I was appreciated.

What has been the best piece of advice you’ve received? On the flip side, what has been the worst, and if applicable, how has it revealed the conscious and/or unconscious racial bias of the speaker?

The best advice I have received is to put my oxygen mask on first. Self-care is critical to my being the best mother possible, and every day I strive to make myself a priority.

The worst advice was that my future baby from the foster care system would be a “crack” baby. The speaker believed the 1990s media frenzy about how the first parents who used crack cocaine would produce babies who would not thrive, would be sickly, would have physical and developmental delays and grow up to be criminals. Of course, this was nonsense, and research later confirmed that foster children who were drug exposed and then placed in stable homes showed no academic or developmental differences by third grade. It all came down to children having a safe, loving and stable home environment. Sadly, this bad advice was not a function of racist unconscious basis but media-sponsored fear and misinformation run amok.

If you could go back and do one thing differently during your adoption journey, would you? And if so, what would it be and why?

My adoption journey had peaks and valleys, but the outcome was two healthy, sweet children. I wouldn’t change a thing.

How do you think the foster and adoptive system can be improved in the U.S.?

One way to improve the foster and adoptive system is to hire additional social workers and reduce their caseloads. Smaller caseloads would serve three purposes: (1) individualized support for first parents, who often unconsciously repeat their own cycles of abuse and neglect and lose custody of their children; (2) better screenings for prospective foster/adoptive parents when family reunification is no longer feasible; and (3) the ability for social workers to really bond with children on their caseload, in order to find the best matches for them.

Do you envision August and/or Cherish reading your memoir when they’re older? What is the most important thing you hope they take away from the book?

Absolutely. August has already tried to read it, but I keep taking it from him. LOL

I hope they know how much I love and admire them. I did my best to make their journeys easier and hope they remember to pay it forward.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Motherhood So White.

Author photo by Bobby Quillard

After a lifetime as her family’s secret keeper, Adrienne Brodeur faces the truth, finds compassion for her mother and breaks a generations-long pattern of dysfunction.

The best memoirs can resonate with readers who are the furthest removed from the book’s events. These stories gently tug on knotty threads and unspool to reveal a common humanity. For most readers, what happens to Adrienne Brodeur in her memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is incomprehensible. But in Brodeur’s talented hands, every reader who has ever had an unhappy mother can relate. 

First, the story: One night, when Brodeur is 14 years old, her mother, Malabar, wakes her up. Malabar was a divorced journalist and cookbook author who moved her children to Massachusetts to live with her wealthy new husband, a man who became ill not long after their marriage. On this life-altering night, Malabar gleefully shares with her daughter that a charismatic family friend, Ben—also married to someone who is not well—had kissed her. 

Behind their spouses’ backs, Ben keeps kissing Malabar, and then some. A giddy Malabar updates her adolescent daughter about every twist and turn as the affair unfolds, from the beaches of Cape Cod to hotels in New York City. Together, the three keep the affair a secret from both families. The deception seems to eat away only at Brodeur. 

Still, Brodeur is pleased to be let into her enigmatic mother’s secret world. She counsels Malabar on how to hide the affair and even provides cover stories—uneasily, of course, but Brodeur had been manipulated into believing that “this affair was being conducted with everyone’s best interests at heart.” Throughout high school, college and young adulthood, her mom’s forbidden romance consumes Brodeur. She dreads the day it might become known and hurt people she loves. (No spoilers, but what happens to both families is more complicated than the reader could ever imagine.)

The book is causing a stir in both the publishing industry and Hollywood. Fourteen publishing houses bid for Wild Game at auction, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paid a seven-figure advance. Brodeur sold the film rights to Chernin Entertainment, and filmmaker Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) is helming the adaptation. Like any memoirist, Brodeur is nervous about how such a personal story will be depicted on screen. But she’s read a first draft of a screenplay “that managed to capture all the emotional truth and essence and yet be very much its own thing,” she says.

“For all of us people in the world who do have difficult childhoods or hold some secret, I hope the book demonstrates that, by facing them, we can all get out from under them.”

Now 53, Brodeur says there wasn’t a specific moment when she knew her life story could be a memoir. (She had a long history of shepherding other writers’ stories into existence, first as co-founder of the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with director Francis Ford Coppola, and now as executive director of the literary nonprofit Aspen Words.) A turning point came 14 years ago, she says, when she became a parent and experienced the mother-child bond from the other side. 

“It dawned on me that I really needed to reckon with my past and that I didn’t want to repeat these—it’s sort of catchphrase-y—but inherited traumas, these things that had happened to me that seemed to have happened to generations of my family,” she says.

The “things” to which Brodeur refers are infidelity, violence, narcissism and alcoholism. Additionally, Malabar suffered the death of her first child, Christopher, who choked to death at age 2, and an ensuing acrimonious divorce from Brodeur’s father, New Yorker writer Paul Brodeur. Adrienne acknowledges, “[My mother] had a much, much more difficult childhood and life than I ever did.”

But does a difficult life absolve Malabar of her mistakes? Brodeur says, “The surprising thing that took place in exploring what was a complicated part of my life was how . . . the need to forgive [my mother], on some level, took a back seat to the need to understand her.” While researching for the book, Brodeur returned to her own journals from this time, and she read through her mother’s copious notes on recipes and articles. “As I researched her life and put myself in her shoes, it became a path to forgiveness,” she says. “My heart expanded from going through this process. I truly believe that my mother did the best job she could, and obviously, she made enormous mistakes.”

It would be easy to dismiss Wild Game as shocking family drama. But Brodeur weaves together the story of her parentified childhood, the burdens of secret-keeping and her mother’s traumatic life such that we learn from her bottomless compassion. 

“It’s a story of resilience and breaking patterns,” she says. “For all of us people in the world who do have difficult childhoods or hold some secret, I hope the book demonstrates that, by facing them, we can all get out from under them.”

As Brodeur faces her family’s secrets in Wild Game, she reveals the beauty in humanity’s messiness—most of all her own. And as with only the best memoirs, we the readers are better for it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Wild Game.