When the Nuclear Family Model Stops Making Sense
Three years ago, a DC-area couple bought a house with an apartment-style basement – private entrance, full kitchen, full bathroom – and assumed they’d never use it for anything unusual. Then a friend lost his lease.
He moved in “for a few months, tops.” He stayed two years. When he left, the couple – one of whom is Emily Mirengoff, the interviewer behind a new conversation-driven piece on the anthology Living, Together – had grown so used to the arrangement that they brought in a new tenant, a stranger this time. Within weeks, that stranger was showing up at the farmers market where she works and bringing fruit home for Mirengoff’s toddler, watching the child eat with delight or scrunch her face in disapproval. It’s a small thing. It’s also the kind of thing that doesn’t happen when you live alone, behind a locked door, in a house built for one insular unit. That gap between what we assume domestic life should look like and what it can actually produce is exactly the territory that Living, Together – edited by Samantha Paige Rosen – sets out to map.
The book is an anthology, and Rosen uses the word “communal” in the widest possible sense. Essays and Q&As move across roommates and group houses, traditional Native American communal living, a writers’ residency run out of a couple’s Los Angeles home, and several arrangements that resist easy categorization. The editor also brings in Adam Vitcavage – founder of the literary site Debutiful, who spent four years in his twenties living with his sister – and Suanne Carlson, co-founder of the Homes on Wheels Alliance, a nonprofit built to support people who live nomadically on the road.
Rosen quotes writer Margot Kahn in her introduction, describing an anthology as a “town hall bound in pages.” Town halls are messy by design, and Living, Together doesn’t sand that down. What it avoids, unlike the town hall metaphor’s less flattering implications, is domination by a narrow slice of experience. When Mirengoff asked how that breadth was achieved, Rosen’s answer was less about curation strategy and more about restraint: her agent had to push her to stop organizing the book around living scenarios and start putting the individual story first. Even then, Rosen says part of her still feels the book should cover more ground.
The Financial Reality Underneath the Warmth
Living, Together does not romanticize the economics that push people into shared living. Rosen is direct about the fact that communal arrangements are often driven by financial inequity and hardship – not by some utopian desire to reconnect with neighbors. The book holds both things at once: an honest accounting of why people end up sharing space and a genuine curiosity about what they find there when they do.
One of Rosen’s cited examples is Hope Meadows, an intergenerational neighborhood in Illinois founded roughly 30 years ago on a former Air Force base. The original model offered free housing and benefits to families who permanently adopted children out of foster care. Alongside them, seniors received reduced-cost housing in exchange for volunteering within the community – effectively becoming surrogate grandparents to kids who needed exactly that. The arrangement wasn’t sentimental in its design; it was structural. Housing costs and community obligations were explicitly linked, creating interdependence rather than relying on goodwill alone to hold the neighborhood together.
That kind of designed interdependence runs through the anthology as a recurring thread. Rosen frames it in terms of what she calls “sustainable resiliency” – a future in which communal structures don’t just survive economic pressure but build some buffer against it. She connects modern Western living arrangements directly to capitalism, industrialization, and colonialism, arguing that the nuclear family as default isn’t a neutral cultural preference but a product of specific historical forces. The contributors who live outside that model – whether in group houses, on the road, or in intergenerational neighborhoods – aren’t just making lifestyle choices. They’re operating against an inherited set of assumptions about what a household is supposed to be.
Carlson’s contribution through the Homes on Wheels Alliance adds another dimension. Mobile living sits at an uncomfortable intersection: it can be a choice made freely, or a response to housing costs that leave conventional options out of reach, or both at once. The nonprofit exists to support people in that situation regardless of how they arrived there, which reflects something the anthology keeps returning to – the question of whether the warmth and community that can emerge from shared living change depending on whether that living was chosen or compelled.
Vitcavage’s four years living with his sister in his twenties offer a different angle: the adult sibling household, which carries its own social stigma in a culture that treats independent living as a marker of maturity. His presence in the anthology suggests Rosen was interested in arrangements that are often invisible in conversations about communal life – not communes, not co-ops, just people living with family past the age when that’s considered normal. The kinds of stories that get written about and elevated shape what readers consider worth examining, and there’s an argument that adult sibling households, informal basement rentals, and road-based communities have been systematically underrepresented in literary nonfiction about domestic life.
What the Essays Share Across Very Different Walls
Mirengoff notes that despite the range of living scenarios, what struck her most was the consistency in what the essays produced emotionally – acts of tenderness surfacing in arrangements built initially out of necessity or practicality. People caring for aging parents. Adults investing in children who aren’t theirs. Fruit from a farmers market left for a toddler who may or may not like it.
Rosen’s editorial instinct, pushed by her agent toward individual story over categorical representation, seems to have produced something that functions differently from most books about alternative living. It doesn’t argue for communal life as a policy prescription or a corrective ideology. It presents people who made a specific choice – or found themselves without another option – and examines what grew out of that. The result sits somewhere between memoir anthology and cultural argument, honest enough about hardship that the moments of genuine connection don’t read as manufactured, and specific enough in its details that the hopefulness doesn’t drift into abstraction. Whether Hope Meadows’ model has survived the 30 years since its founding on that Illinois Air Force base intact, or whether it has bent under the same pressures that strain every communal experiment eventually, the book doesn’t say.
