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The Family Outing – how one family deals with each other’s coming out story
The Family Outing tells the story of Jessi Hempel, who was raised in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. But the truth was far from perfect. Her father was constantly away from home, traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Growing up, Jessi and her two siblings struggled to make sense of their family, their world, their changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. And each, in their own way, was hiding their true self from the world.
By the time Jessi reached adulthood, everyone in her family had come out: Jessi as gay, her sister as bisexual, her father as gay, her brother as transgender (leading to this TIME cover story written by Jessi), and her mother as a survivor of a traumatic experience with a serial killer. Yet coming out was just the beginning, starting a chain reaction of other personal revelations and reckonings that caused each of them to question their place in the world in new and ultimately liberating ways.
The Hempels’ story is at once unique, shocking, and deeply moving, and it calls to mind such classics of the genre as Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Tara Westover’s Educated.
Available from Harper Collins
Jessi Hempel is a Senior Editor at Large at LinkedIn and host of the Webby-nominated podcast Hello Monday. For almost twenty years, she has been writing and editing features and cover stories about the most important people and companies in technology. Most recently, she was the head of editorial for Backchannel and a senior writer at Wired. She has also held positions at Fortune, where she co-chaired its Aspen tech conference, BusinessWeek, and Time Asia. She has appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox, and CNBC, addressing the culture and business of technology. Hempel is a graduate of Brown University and received a Master’s in Journalism from UC Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About the Author
Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist based in Toronto with a focus on tourism, lifestyle, entertainment and community issues. He has written several travel articles and has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He’s willing to take on any assignments of interest, attend parties with free booze, listen to rants, and travel the world in search of the great unknown. He’s eager to discover the new, remember the past, and look into the future.