Regina Mahone: Although polyamorous relationships—the subject of your previous book—formed the basis of your approach to building kinship, I was moved by how deeply rooted children are in this antidote to the loneliness epidemic. Can you talk about the possibilities you see for protecting the most vulnerable in our society—children—through the formation of a kin group?

Sophie Lucido Johnson: Thank you for pulling that out. It’s not something I’ve been invited to talk about much. I think because parents are stretched pretty thin and they are not reading this kind of book right now, I am mostly talking to people who don’t have children. So that’s part of it. It’s really important for people who don’t have children to spend time with kids. I remember talking to queer activist S. Bear Bergman early on in this project. He has kids and feels strongly that it’s important for adults who don’t have kids to spend time with kids and for parents to let go of some of the control we wield around our children, which is already sort of made up because they’re just going to be who they are. And so it feels [necessary] to me that protecting children is a communal effort and a communal decision. And that means we’re all taking care of each other’s children, or when we see children that we look out for them.

Right now, childcare is so privatized. Even public schools are full of private decisions, and [as a teacher] I understand why that is: We have different beliefs about what is best for children. But I do think it’s pretty universally true that children benefit from knowing more adults. And the best thing we can do for them is to give them access to more models for how adulthood can look and more places to turn when they’re feeling scared or confused or powerless. That does feel central to this work. And it is challenging, because there’s parts of that that aren’t fun and aren’t necessarily easy for anybody. But once you get over that hump, the joy that results for parents from having more time, for people without kids from getting to know kids, and for kids themselves from having more adults [in their lives] is important and valuable.

RM: You explain how the epidemic of loneliness we are facing is very much tied to myths around building nuclear families. You argue that it’s not just that we have to unlearn these concepts of the nuclear family, but that everyone should see themselves as their own nucleus. Can you talk more about that and why we need to center well-being over fundamentally flawed concepts like the nuclear family?

SLJ: The reason I am recentering the nucleus on the self is because the only way you can be in a loving and functional relationship is if you are not abusing yourself and if you know how to love and take care of yourself. There are so many analogies that work here…

RM: You use the analogy of a bee colony in the book. You write about how a bee colony consists of one queen, whose only job is to lay eggs, and her huge extended family that “divides up labor so that everyone has what they need and they can keep on building and growing and thriving and surviving.”

SLJ: Bees function more similarly to humans than many organisms do. There’s so much that is similar that it’s an appropriate comparison, really. We are wired the same in terms of how we work communally. It doesn’t work if you’re all by yourself in a little, tiny unit trying to do a million things. So I would say that taking care of yourself—which to me means being able to understand your own value systems, take the time to set boundaries where appropriate and available, and believe that your needs are important—we need that amount of self-work to be done in order for these systems to function.

One of the problems with the nuclear family is that it starts with two heads of the family [who are] pretty young. It’s supposed to start when you’re in your 20s, if you follow the model, and then you have two kids that you have to take care of. But you haven’t done the work yet of figuring out how to be a self-sustaining adult. You’re cutting off your support when you say, “I’m moving into a single-family home and having my 2.5 children.” And then you’re like, “Why isn’t this working?” The parts weren’t there in the first place. There was no way it was going to work.

RM: Building a network of deeply bonded relationships feels to me like the hardest part, especially when you already feel like you cannot take on one more thing. And then there’s the feelings of fear and jealousy that can surface when forming these relationships. I have not stopped thinking about the interview you mentioned that you had conducted with a woman whose friend group breastfed each other’s babies. I noticed my own feelings of jealousy while reading that part, though of course I would have loved more sleep and support when my kids were infants! Can you talk about the role that these feelings and perceived limitations play when it comes to building the structures we truly deserve to survive?

SLJ: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, jealousy is really useful. When I notice it coming up in myself, I’m like, “Ooh, OK.” It’s telling me about some need I don’t have met or some real deep desire that is close enough to being a need that is unmet, and I need to figure out what that is, because if it’s showing up here, it’s showing up in other parts of my life that I might not even be aware of. This turns up a lot in relationships, but it also shows up at work, and it shows up a lot with our kids. It’s not just, “I want the thing that person has.” It’s more like, “I need more than I have, and I don’t know how to get it.” I think the map that we get from jealousy is crucial.

The breastfeeding thing is super interesting because there are entire books about the history of breastfeeding and how women who had money didn’t used to breastfeed their own babies at all. And then the hard-won feminist rights issue of should we be given space to chest feed. There are so many complications that are rooted in race and class and history and family and gender, and that’s a fraught topic. But it gets at this question around possessiveness that I think is useful, and when there’s this feeling of, “oh, but that’s mine.” Where does that come from? And who is benefiting from that belief? It comes from widespread late-stage capitalism, which is about ownership and having more; more is equated with better. Capitalism is harming us as a species. The ends to which we’re wanting things for our individual selves [is] a death knell, because we need each other so badly, and this is a way that we cut ourselves off from one another.

RM: When we open ourselves up and form these bonds, it’s a lot of work to keep them strong. You explain it requires a type of “radical honesty.” Can you talk about why the truth is so complicated?

SLJ: This is my favorite topic, because I grew up really believing that taking care of people’s feelings was much more important than honesty. Taking care of people’s feelings is important; it’s important to hold empathy and know that the way that you talk and the things that you do affect those around you. That’s essential. And honesty is the best way to love. This [idea] goes back to our lord and savior bell hooks. She has a chapter in All About Love about honesty and how if lying is central to how you show up in the world, there’s no way to trust that anyone loves the person that you really are, and you deserve to know that you are worthy of love just as you are. I’ve greatly oversimplified a brilliant philosophy, but that’s essential. It’s scary, and absolutely not something we see in the world. It’s so hard to not have [honesty] come off as rude.

A lot of what we can do is change how we deal with the problem of truth-telling, again [starting] with children. The problem is, if a child does something that you don’t want them to do and then they tell you the truth about it, they still face punitive consequences. And so they have no incentive to tell the truth. It’s important for us to be able to encourage children telling the truth while also revisiting what happened and why they did it. There are a lot of resources on how to go about this, but I think so much of it has to do with slowing down, which is annoying, especially when parenting, because it would be nice if it could go fast.

I am going to speak as a teacher more than as a parent now, because I have done that for much longer and have found this to be true. As a teacher of young people, if I lead with, “I’m really grateful that you told me what is true—that you said to me that you played video games all weekend and did not even think about doing your work. It makes me trust you, and it helps me to start to think about what we need to do to get you where you need to be to pass this class.” [With this approach, I’m] lifting up that the truth was the most important thing, that we’re not going to reward or punish [their behavior but instead tell them], “Wow, that means a lot to me. It makes me feel grateful that you’re telling the truth.”

The truth is not always safe, especially for people in disenfranchised communities. It’s essential to build relationships where it becomes safe, and [that takes time]. You don’t owe anyone your whole truth, especially as you are first getting to know them. They have not earned it. So being explicit in your relationships and saying, “I want to be in a radically honest relationship with you. I think this is a journey. This is what this would look like to me. How does that feel for you?” This is a lot of communicating that I know that’s cringe for some people. If there’s another way to get here, please tell me what it is. I don’t know what it is. I do know that I have relationships like this, and they aren’t my most comfortable relationships, but they are my most valuable relationships and my closest relationships. It’s essential to not equate comfort with intimacy.

RM: Speaking of truth-telling, in the epilogue, you explain that more darkness is on its way—a reference to the second Trump term—but that it’s possible to “build something that can’t be destroyed by a fire or a flood or a tyrannical president.” This feels so hard to accept: that we can withstand the worst we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes through kinship. But it’s a time-tested concept, as you point out in your book, particularly for communities of color, and as we are seeing in real time, like in Chicago, where people are protecting their neighbors against ICE raids and arrests. Can you talk about the role of kin in keeping us from feeling stuck and immobile and hopeless in this awful moment we are living through?

SLJ: There’s no coming back from the decisions that people have made throughout history. There’s going to be more at least climate-related disaster, that is certain. That used to be something so terrifying for me that I just didn’t even know how to bear it. I didn’t know how to sleep. It felt completely overwhelming. And then there was this shift as we started to experience disaster in places where I [noticed] people fundamentally want to show up for each other. People stop what they’re doing and say, “How can I help?” Or, “Here’s how I’m going to help.” Or, “I don’t even know who you are, but the thing you’re going through is so shitty that it’s more important than the thing I’m going through, and I’m showing up for you.” Yes, that has been happening in my neighborhood in Chicago in ways that are really moving. And also, when we started to see the outpouring of support for our neighbors over the last few months, my thought was, this was inevitable. There was no other possibility.

That doesn’t mean on an individual level there isn’t going to be trauma and pain and things that are just unimaginably hard. But on a collective level, our species has the capacity to do better, and we will have to, because there’s no alternative. For all of human history, people have figured out how to show up for each other when they needed to.

We do have to grieve and mourn and feel all the pain that comes with this unraveling. But don’t let it block out the light.