Travel Book Club "How to Be a Family" with Author Dan Kois

Posted: 8/4/2022 | August 4th, 2022

What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids’ lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family?

A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.

Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the DC suburbs, they scheduled their children’s time wisely, and when they weren’t arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two preteen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren’t families supposed to achieve happiness together?

In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois’ go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Kois is a writer at Slate. His novel Vintage Contemporaries will be published in 2023. He is the author of How to Be a Family (2019); The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler, 2018); and Facing Future (2011). He lives in Arlington, Virginia with his family.

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