Group Living and Other Recipes (A Memoir)

A spirited and timely exploration of group living that encourages readers to reconsider the meaning of family and home.

Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both her parents threw open their rambling house in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates—an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in furthering the experiment of communal living into a new generation.

Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman House—of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopian—with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life. From spending time at her aunt and uncle’s intentional community in Washington State to finding her footing in the kitchen as a student in Japan to mushroom hunting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Milholland offers an expansive and vibrant reevaluation of the structures at the very center of our lives.

Thoughtful, quirky, candid, and wise, Group Living and Other Recipes introduces a gifted memoirist and thinker, making a convincing case that “now is always the right time to reimagine home and family.”