Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir

Nancy’s fragile solidity was formed through the volcanic eruptions of her rage and heartbreak, cooled too quickly by the necessities of life and left in what resembled a fixed form.

I’d taken for granted what was required for women in the sixties to reimagine their lives and cut against the cultural grain, but it wasn’t a subtle shift. It was a cataclysm. Rejecting cultural norms took a strength of conviction fierce enough to oppose the status quo.

Idiorrhythmy describes the lifestyle of monks on Mount Athos, who were both isolated and in contact with one another. “Each subject lives according to his own rhythm,” Barthes writes. He called it “something like solitude with regular interruptions . . . the utopia of a socialism of distance.”

the best way to ask people for something—to do a chore, for example, and especially to make a behavior change—is to state the request directly and with as little judgment or frustration as possible. And the opposite holds true: if someone asks me to do something that’s important to them, I try to do it without getting defensive.

Freedom and structure: Too much freedom is meaningless. Too much structure is stifling. Some structure creates space for free experimentation. Being together and being alone: One creates the pleasure of the other. Without one, the other becomes oppressive. Power and surrender: Sometimes we need to be unyielding and determined; at other times, we de

To stigmatize group living is to dismiss the pressures of the housing crisis; the need to reimagine women’s unpaid domestic labor; the fact that loneliness and isolation menace all ages; and the racist, classist roots of the nuclear family and single-family home.

This recipe embodies some of the exact stereotypes about group living that I instinctively want to distance myself from: apparent openness masking rigidity, self-righteousness, carelessness in appropriating Asian cultures and ingredients, mind-over-matter rhetoric that manages to sweep all structural inequity under a rag rug, and unappealing food.

We are all giving and receiving, and through those interactions, we become like one organism.

They renewed their relationships to one another and to their history and the natural world by foraging, clamming, farming, gardening, cooking, and eating together.