Dan Kois is an editor at Slate, founding host of the podcast Mom and Dad Are Fighting, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together (Little, Brown and Company). In this “funny and honest” (Pamela Druckerman) memoir, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together. Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. 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 pre-teen 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. A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, How to Be a Family will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.
