Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir

Intentional communities don’t inherently create the conditions for what I love about group living—camaraderie, intimacy, synchrony. I’m drawn to something less structured than an intentional community but less atomized than the nuclear family, some squishier in-between place. I’m unwilling to participate in the amount of process these communities d

co-ops arise from mutual vision and need,

How could I so powerfully agree with their politics and also feel so uneasy with their form of expression?

By cooking for and eating food made by other people, I give and receive each day, which feels as central to my life as inhaling and exhaling. I salvage my sanity by laughing with my housemates, and I depend on their perspectives to help me outgrow my own. That’s group living too,

there are more expansive ways to imagine home.

My meals were no longer my gifts.

reminded me that living with someone without mutual care is worse than living alone.

The form of the protest—the bizarre blood sculpture, the poems—was itself a protest against passivity, lack of imagination, and normalcy.

Mike Leigh, the British director of numerous excruciating comedies,