Rin Reczek is Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. She is the co-author of Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents and the co-editor of Marriage and Health: The Well-Being of Same-Sex Couples.
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Description
"Stories about family estrangement are proliferating, but most of these are told by the parents and grandparents who get left behind. With Families We Lose, finally we hear from those who are doing the leaving. Best of all, this important book helps to demystify the phenomenon, beyond too-simple explanations of unhappy people lured to estrange from others by therapy or social media. Instead, Rin Reczek points out that what we are seeing is a collision of two cultural ideals of what counts as family, and what we ought to expect from family members. With poignant accounts from people who insist upon a new model of democratized kinship, Reczek counters popular concern about why those who estrange themselves "don't value family." Instead, as this book demonstrates, they value family so much, they are willing to invent new relationships to pursue a better version of it. Families We Lose goes beyond the headlines to add some important voices missing from the current conversation, and to give us some vital analytical tools to make sense of them."-- "Allison Pugh, author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World"