NEXT OF KIN

A fraught family memoir by the renowned chef and restaurateur.

Just a few sentences into Hamilton’s narrative, and one is instantly reminded of that Tolstoyan saw about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way. At the start, Hamilton (Blood, Bones & Butter, 2011) is reestablishing contact with her estranged mother: “We haven’t spoken to each other in thirtyish years,” she writes, and now their roles are being reversed, the aged mother being cared for by the child. With a nod to Anne Lamott’s observation that “if people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better,” Hamilton dishes enough psyche-wounding tales to fund a battalion of therapists: a father who “did not seem hindered by the possibility of his own mediocrity”; that mother, whose vocabulary was broad and learned but always included the word “no” (“With her there were daily dozens of the regular garden-variety Mom No. But she could hit some thornier Nos in there, too, not quite as mundane”); an adventurous brother whose life spiraled downward into mental illness and suicide; another brother, “the only guy in our family with Reliable Money,” who came to an unhappy end; and much more. Hamilton is unsparing of herself, too: She confesses to having stolen away her sister’s husband in a none-too-secret affair, a turnabout for the sister’s having stolen him in the first place. She is also self-aware in sizing up the toll of injuries and sorrows to conclude, “This is not Art. Nor Anecdote. This is Life. Something to sit up straight and salvage what’s left of.” Salvage she does, in her own way, finally coming to terms with her father’s profligacy, her mother’s eccentricity, death and distance, and her own foibles—about which, on the last page of this memorable book, her mother has the last word, and a mot that couldn’t be more juste.

A nimbly written, alternately dark and hopeful account of dysfunction layered on dysfunction.