Next of Kin

Gabrielle Hamilton is a chef, restaurant owner, and writer who contributes a monthly food column to The New York Times Magazine. Her memoir traces the slow unraveling of her family across several decades, structured around the deaths and estrangements that reduced a once-vibrant household of seven to a scattered collection of survivors barely in contact with one another.

The memoir opens with a voicemail. Gabrielle's mother, in her eighties and living alone on a mountaintop in Vermont, had been contacted by a fact-checker about Gabrielle's latest column, an essay about a tomato sandwich inspired by a family vacation in Corsica. The two women had not spoken in roughly thirty years. Her mother's voice oscillated between imperious authority and trembling vulnerability as she asked whether the essay was "kind or unkind." Gabrielle reflects that the two of them were about to trade positions: She would become the caretaker, her mother the child. But at that point, they remained fixed in their lifelong roles.

The narrative then moves backward, introducing the Hamilton family in its early years. Gabrielle's father, James Harvey Peterman Hamilton, was a charismatic theatrical scenic designer who ran a shop in a converted roller rink in Pennsylvania. A gifted raconteur who freely borrowed and embellished other people's stories, he instilled in his five children a deep wariness of mediocrity. He had wanted to be a painter but concluded that "the world doesn't need another mediocre painter" and turned to design as a trade. Gabrielle internalized this philosophy, eventually surrendering her own dream of writing in favor of restaurant work. Their mother possessed near-supernatural hearing and an exacting temperament, fiercely strict with her children.

Gabrielle's oldest brother, Jeffrey David Hamilton, was the family's most mesmerizing figure. As a teenager, he collected arrowheads and animal skulls, fashioned pants from roadkill deerskin, and completed a senior project by living in the woods for a week using primitive tools. At nineteen, he walked out the kitchen door and hitchhiked to Africa, eventually reaching the Ituri Forest in what was then the Belgian Congo, where he lived with Mbuti Pygmies. He sent home long airmail letters describing elephant hunts and his growing disillusionment. Gabrielle, still in elementary school, boasted of his adventures to classmates, though she did not yet recognize the signs of depression visible in his letters.

The family fractured when Gabrielle was around ten. Her mother announced a divorce, falsely claiming the children supported the decision. Their father moved to a rooming house with no heat. One winter night he returned asking Gabrielle for a blanket. She sneaked upstairs, but the wicker chest's hinges squealed, waking her mother, who called down a single word: "No." Unable to part with her own cherished black fake-fur blanket, Gabrielle delivered the refusal and watched her father stagger away. This "No" becomes emblematic of a broader pattern in her mother's character, one that gains terrible significance later.

After the divorce, Gabrielle and her younger brother Simon were taken to Vermont for a miserable school year before being released back to their father. In Pennsylvania, the household was unsupervised and chaotic: Their father was mostly away for work, creditors called, and the pantry held rancid food. One evening he joked grimly about driving himself off a bridge because the children were so expensive. Gabrielle, thirteen, walked into town and got a job as a dishwasher. She began secretly driving her father's car. When Simon confiscated the key and she stole it back, Simon, drunk, attacked her violently, dragging her across the yard and gravel. Their father arranged a lunch to discuss the incident, but when Gabrielle showed him her bruises, he said he would have "finished the job" himself. Gabrielle and Simon entered a decades-long détente, carefully orbiting each other at family gatherings but rarely speaking.

At seventeen, Gabrielle dropped out of college and confronted her father for refusing to attend Jeffrey's Stanford graduation, choosing instead to perform in a tap dance recital. She and her brother Todd, a young vice president at Goldman Sachs, bought their father a plane ticket. He refused it in a fury and for years afterward would not make eye contact with Gabrielle.

Todd died suddenly, two months shy of his forty-sixth birthday, from a massive explosion in his carotid artery, likely related to undiagnosed sleep apnea. At a memorial luncheon, their father remarked, "Well, if you have to lose one, at least it's the one you liked least." Todd's death prompted Gabrielle to send her estranged mother a condolence card, her first contact in fifteen years, followed by a brief visit to introduce her infant son. She found her mother entirely unchanged, living in what Gabrielle perceived as a mausoleum of fixed routines, and left certain she would not pursue further contact.

Meanwhile, Gabrielle's marriage to her sons' Italian father was failing. She describes her own parenting failures candidly: roaring obscenities at her children, being unable to set boundaries in reaction against her mother's relentless refusals. Her older son Marco, in fourth grade, delivered a devastating assessment of her emotional maturity and asked to live with his father.

Then came the rupture that destroyed what remained of the family. Gabrielle and Michael, her sister Melissa's husband of twenty-three years, became a couple. Michael had originally been Gabrielle's boyfriend before having an affair with Melissa decades earlier. The reversal was catastrophic: Jeffrey lost his anchor and the last gathering place that had held the family together. Gabrielle's father declared her dead to him. The affair became tabloid gossip, and the relationship with Michael lasted only a couple of years.

In 2014, Jeffrey killed himself at fifty-seven. Their father left a voicemail: "Last night Jeffrey hung himself. Anyway. That's over." The shrugging tone struck Gabrielle as something potentially lethal. For the first time, the family traits she had prized, including dark humor, unflinching candor, and fierce individualism, began to seem dangerous.

A rumor circulated that Jeffrey had called their mother asking to stay with her and that she had said no. Two years later, Gabrielle called to ask about it. Her mother confirmed the refusal but provided context: She had investigated attaching Jeffrey's medical care to her Medicaid and looked into a job for him but concluded she could not manage his care on a fixed income of $13,000 a year. When Gabrielle asked if she felt guilty, her mother said she felt "rather proud of him" for having "such courage to put an end to his anguish."

Gabrielle spent years hunting for details of Jeffrey's death. The official records revealed he died not in a magnificent forest but in a basement storage area, using a white plastic extension cord and an aluminum ladder. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and jean shorts. Two checks from their father, $120 each, were in his wallet. His dinner the night before was uneaten. Gabrielle confronts the gap between her fantasy of a courageous, aesthetically organized death and the stark reality, concluding it was none of those things. She frames the family's destruction not as a single catastrophe but as a slow, imperceptible poisoning, like carbon monoxide seeping into a house.

At her father's memorial service, strangers told Gabrielle of his philanthropy and generosity, qualities she recognized as genuine, coexisting with everything else. The mayor insisted he was "a complicated man," but Gabrielle privately distinguished between ordinary complexity and something more destructive.

In the memoir's final movement, Gabrielle visited her eighty-seven-year-old mother, bringing her wife Ashley, her teenage sons, and their dog. On the dresser sat Jeffrey's ashes in a cardboard box. Gabrielle discovered her childhood blanket, the one she could not give her father decades ago, folded on her mother's reading chair. When her mother, now ninety, fell and fractured her pelvis, Gabrielle took over her care at a Medicaid nursing facility. The old woman, on an eight-to-ten-minute memory loop, was more appreciative than she had ever been, praising Gabrielle's appearance and expressing gratitude. When her mother asked what she was writing, Gabrielle joked that she always wrote about the same thing: how much she loved everybody, and the loss, destruction, and death of her family. "Obviously, it's a comedy," she added. Her mother paused. "Of errors," she replied.