Family Outing

For readers of Fun Home, Educated, and Priestdaddy, a striking literary memoir about identity, family, and the courage it takes to accept your authentic self, centered around one family's transformation from traditional American ideal to an entirely new incarnation—with almost every member embracing a queer identity.

Jessi Hempel was raised in a picture-perfect, middle-class American family. But the truth was far from perfect. Her lawyer-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.

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, 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 Family Outing is the Hempels' remarkable story—a thoughtful, soul-baring journey that explores how each member began their lives in the closet in their own ways, how suppressing the truth about themselves warped their sense of self and their relationships, and how they each eventually navigated the bumpy and sometimes opaque path to find and accept their authentic selves. Told by Jessi in her wry and original voice, this moving and hopeful memoir reveals how one "average” family, in finding themselves, finally found one another.