Lola Milholland’s dad, David, who wears his silver hair at shoulder length and has the beard and eyebrows to match, brought a gift to dinner at his daughter’s. “Pops got us a shiitake log,” Lola shouted across the kitchen to her brother, Zak, “so we can grow them.” Lola, 39, is the founder of local noodle company Umi Organic. She and Zak, 50, both live here. So does Lola’s partner, Corey. And their friend Christopher. Sometimes Christopher’s partner, Erin, too. David is in an apartment a few blocks away. Zak and Lola’s mom, Theresa, has moved out of state. But this, the mythical “Holman House,” was their childhood home, almost a fifth family member. They like company. 

That night in June there were 10 of us. Everyone cooked, moving with the choreography of a restaurant brigade. Multiple conversations hung over a thrum of chopping sounds and sizzling pans. Fresh ginger and Thai chile filled the air. The scene was like many in Lola Milholland’s new book, Group Living and Other Recipes—equal parts food-obsessed memoir and cultural critique promoting communal living, which she sees as far more logical than single-family homes. Despite including recipes, it isn’t a food book. Instead, food is how Milholland articulates the glue holding her group together.

Throughout Milholland’s life, the Holman House has hosted monks and poets, exchange students and relatives. “My parents welcomed visitors and we made a life together,” she writes in the book. She and Zak stayed in the house when their parents moved out and carried on the philosophy, finding their own alternatives to the societal norm of a single-family household. Financially, her situation helped offset late capitalism’s squeeze. But more to the point, living inside a group altered her worldview. The house, its robust community, and their pooled resources gave her a profoundly durable sense of belonging. The constant shifting became a comfortable rhythm. The group was always remaking itself, she writes, “somehow never from scratch but always anew.” 

Throughout most of global history, communal living was a necessity. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we began to isolate ourselves. Suburbia’s rise in the mid-twentieth century, compounded with postwar consumerism, solidified a certain American dream. Families broke off as domestic appliances grew more accessible. Why share laundry and cooking resources if you don’t have to? 

Milholland’s house is a direct protest of the concept, even if most in its orbit don’t see it as particularly political. An expanded household carries connotations today. Inevitably the word “cult” comes up, Milholland says. And her group escapes easy labels: not simply roommates or a multigenerational household. They just take care of each other in little ways that, cumulatively, have an immeasurable impact. Milholland didn’t actively choose this lifestyle. None of them did. But by her mid-30s, she was living a life shaped by her upbringing and an economy that made moving out of the house seem absurd. She began to see cohabitating as a worthy alternative to the loneliness and financial quandaries of contemporary American household structures—one worth researching and writing a book on, and maybe recommending to people beyond her household.

In 2007, Milholland graduated college just before the Great Recession. She lived—to her joy—in her childhood home with her brother and his friends. But as time wore on she felt stuck, societal expectations looming. “Is this legitimate adulthood?” she writes, exasperated. When her romantic relationship grew serious, she questioned whether she should try to grow out of this ad hoc arrangement, despite not really wanting to. 

By definition, she writes, “to go nuclear is to lose your fucking shit.” An atom’s nucleus is said to make up just 0.01 percent of its volume while accounting for nearly its entire weight. Milholland was wary of investing so thoroughly in a single bond, a nuclear family. Thinking of nuclear fission, she saw its potential to pit one another against each other, to explode, leaving everyone utterly alone. Culturally, it’s really only prospered in concert with racist, redlining housing policies, which helps explain its decline. The share of US households that fit the married-couple-and-kids-model today is roughly half of what it was when the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed.

Turned off, Milholland questioned what “legitimate adulthood” could mean. Her expanded household became a choice instead of a compromise, and she started testing her potential futures. 

She didn’t have to look far for examples. After sampling a few groups one might legitimately classify as cults, her aunt and uncle founded a cohousing community in Port Townsend, Washington. Her mom now lives in a lodge on a land trust in Wisconsin, pooling resources with a handful of roommates. Both setups made for interesting research, but were too bureaucratic for Milholland. 

Instead, she found resonance in the “gift economies” detailed in poet and scholar Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book, The Gift. With notes from the Bible, Whitman, Marx, and ethnographies of Maori and Massim tribes in the South Pacific, Hyde arrives at a philosophy of gifting as an alternative to market-driven economies. A gift is not a barter but an investment in a larger community, he writes. As Milholland observed, a network is more durable than two people passing things back and forth, keeping tabs. A gift must also stay in motion to engage the entire group and prevent hoarding. But it’s not as simple as passing things along. You have to use the gifts. For example, you could eat them. 

Food is the constant gift in motion at the Holman House. The meals they share are the materialization of their bond: sacred, but informal. Milholland calls it “a marvelous little anarchy.” Contrary to what she saw elsewhere, her take on group living felt mercifully ordinary, if not a little congenital, while still combating the oppressive default. “Join me in my cult of generosity,” she says with a laugh, “whatever that looks like for you, though.” 

There is no recipe for living, Milholland says. But she has found that it’s worth asking the questions, testing recipes as they come up.

The group was making khao tod the night I visited. “Basically, you cook rice and mix it with raw ground pork, lime leaves, and red curry paste,” Milholland told me while searing “little hamburgers” of the mixture. In the book, she writes about tearing the patties into a “raggedy pile” in order to build something new, and the dish, a lettuce wrap situation similar to laab, becomes a metaphor of how the house continuously remakes itself.

“No dessert before dinner, Sissy,” Zak snapped across the kitchen. 

She called back, “I’m just testing it!”