The Family Dynamic

An upcoming book to be published by Penguin Random House.

Autorentext

Susan Dominus has worked for The New York Times since 2007, first as a Metro columnist and then as staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. In 2018, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for its reporting on workplace sexual harassment. She won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and a Mychal Judge Heart of New York Award from the New York Press Club. She has studied as a fellow at the National Institutes of Health and Yale Law School. Her article about menopause in The New York Times Magazine won a National Magazine Award in 2024. She teaches journalism at Yale University.

Klappentext

"Investigative journalist Susan Dominus profiles six families with several exceptionally accomplished children in order to tease apart the various factors that might have led to their success, including inherited tendencies. She starts with the iconic Brontèe sisters, whose remarkable literary success inspired endless speculation about the reason for so much talent under one roof. Dominus ... then moves to the present moment, relating the ... trajectories of families from diverse cultural, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds, including young parents from China who fled the one-child policy to open a Chinese restaurant in Appalachia and sent four children to elite colleges and careers that give back in technology and medicine; the Groff family, whose claim to fame is not just an award-winning novelist but an Olympic athlete and a notable entrepreneur; and the Holifields, raised in the Jim Crow South and boasting two powerful attorneys, both Harvard law school graduates, and a cardiologist, all three influential, in their own ways, in civil rights. Woven into these and other inspiring stories is an account of centuries of scientific research into the question of nature vs. nurture in predicting outcomes"--

Zusammenfassung
What explains those rare families that boast multiple siblings who achieve extraordinary success? An award-winning New York Times journalist weaves story with science to explore the circumstances that set those families apart.

“At once clear-eyed and compassionate, The Family Dynamic uncovers how parents—and siblings—shape and fuel individual success.”—Lisa Damour, bestselling author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers

An Olympic athlete. An award-winning novelist. A successful entrepreneur. All raised under one roof. What can we learn from those families whose children aim high and succeed, sometimes in widely varied fields? Just as important: What were the costs along the way, and what can we glean from their travails and triumphs?

The acclaimed New York Times journalist Susan Dominus offers compelling profiles of six such families in search of the factors that led to their success—was it an inherited quality, a specific way of parenting, the influence of a sibling, or a twist of luck? Inspired by the iconic Brontë sisters, whose remarkable literary success prompted endless speculation, Dominus, the mother of twin teenagers, sought out contemporary high-achieving families who shared intimate stories of their upbringing. She introduces us to the Chens, young parents who fled their country’s one-child policy to open a Chinese restaurant in Appalachia—then sent four children to elite colleges and on to careers that give back in technology and medicine; the Groffs, whose claim to fame is not just an award-winning novelist but an Olympic athlete and a notable entrepreneur; the Wojcickis, whose daughters made inroads as STEM pioneers in Silicon Valley; and the Murguias, who rose from exceptionally humble origins to become powerful jurists and civil rights champions. Woven into these and other stories is an account of centuries of scientific research into the ongoing question of nature versus nurture.

Elegantly written and extensively researched, The Family Dynamic is more than a checklist of how-to’s. It’s a deep and moving exploration of the complexity of family life and the rewards—and burdens—of ambition.

Leseprobe
One

The Groffs

Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, is still sometimes cool in Cooperstown, a village in upstate New York where snow can cover patches of shaded lawn well into the first week of May. The gap between the promise of the coming summer and the reality of the weather conditions in that town was of some interest, in the eighties, to the Groff children of Cooperstown: Adam, the oldest, now a doctor and serial entrepreneur; Lauren, the middle child, now one of the most accomplished novelists of her generation; and Sarah, the youngest, currently a clinical psychology student pursuing her PhD, but also an Olympic triathlete–turned–world-class Ironman competitor.

Family tradition, as Lauren recalled, dictated that on that weekend, only weeks after the last snows had melted, their father, the esteemed Dr. Jerry Groff, would roll back the canvas covering of their pool. His children—a son and two daughters, both tall for their age—would watch quietly, arms clutched around their chests, wearing their bathing suits, as the tarp was rolled back, revealing all manner of accumulated debris on the water’s surface: unidentifiable algae, congealed muck, a dead frog, some floating earthworms. Some years, a thin coating of ice concealed what was below. Jerry Groff maintains that all of that would have been cleared away by the time any children jumped in, but he does recall the children, shrieking and laughing, teeth chattering, as he timed the event: Anyone who could stay in for a full minute would get a dollar. Lauren experienced it more as a competition; she recalled all three children standing still in stoic patience with fingers practically blue, willing time to pass, each of them hoping to display endurance that would surpass that of the other siblings. Who would bear the cold—who would stay in the longest?

This was a challenge of fortitude, if a low-stakes one; later, Sarah and Lauren would refer, half in jest, to events such as this one as the “feats of strength” exercises that characterized their family activities, even as adults. It was an exercise in toughness for kids who did not have it tough. As a child, their father had known privation, but now he had enough money to provide his family with a rambling, historic house on a lake and a pool besides. A pool might be for lounging in on puffy, airy mattresses, for flirty birthday parties, for relief from the heat, but it could also be an excuse for his children to test their mettle. Competition was fun. Pluck and determination, sometimes mixed with brute force—the family came to call that combination of qualities “Groffiness”—could be fun.

Years later, Sarah would make her living as an endurance athlete. Twice she has been an Olympic triathlete, a sheath of female muscle competing against some of the world’s most gifted athletes. In 2023, as the mother of a two-year-old, she won the women’s Ironman European Championship in Frankfurt, swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and running a marathon, all in eight hours, fifty-four minutes, and fifty-three seconds.

Lauren, too, would rely on endurance to make a living. As a novelist and short-story writer, she does it privately, in a converted bedroom her own two children do not readily access. For five or six uninterrupted hours a day, she builds humans, bits of imagined bone and flesh and feeling, characters who populate universes, whole worlds moving through time. She creates her own reality, in order to reflect something yet unseen about the one in which she lives. She writes a draft longhand, throws it away, w…