Like Family Summary: Erin O. White’s Family Drama
TL;DR
A legal letter arrives for sixteen-year-old Siddha, and the life her two mothers built in upstate New York tilts sideways.
The bequest comes from Elliot Shepkins, a hardware store owner from nearby Barton Falls who died suddenly on a basketball court.
Like Family: A Novel by Erin O. White follows what happens when that name enters the household.
Set between the gentrified town of Radclyffe and working-class Barton Falls, the book traces two interconnected families as long-held information surfaces and loyalties shift.
- What it is: A character-driven literary novel about two intertwined families in the Hudson Valley, told through multiple points of view.
- The spark: A dead man’s will reveals that Siddha’s biological father lived twenty minutes away her whole life.
- What follows: A season of unraveled secrets, marital strain, midlife reckonings, and a teenage daughter’s fury.
- Core ideas: Family as practice rather than biology, the cost of protective lies, and what parents project onto their children.
- Ending: A community gathering on May Day, a posthumous letter, and an expanded definition of who counts as kin.
Like Family Summary: The Full Story (Spoilers Ahead)
Spoiler warning: The following section recounts the plot in full, including the ending.
The novel opens in early autumn with Caroline Caruso waiting at a local pond for her best friend, Ruth Schwartz. Ruth arrives shaken. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Siddha, has opened an attorney’s letter informing her that Elliot Shepkins left her a bequest.
Ruth and her wife, Wyn Huntley, then admit the truth. Elliot was not an anonymous donor but a man Ruth dated at twenty-three, present during Siddha’s infancy until a drunk-driving crash led to the termination of his parental rights.
Siddha retreats into silence. Ruth and Wyn go ahead with a Sukkot harvest party at Sugar Hill, the twenty-acre farm they recently bought, hoping to create a distraction.
The gathering brings together the Schwartz-Huntleys, the Caruso-D’Amatos, and the GoldFynch family, along with Bex, a nonbinary folk singer and carpenter working on the farm. Bex mentions attending Elliot’s public memorial that afternoon.
Siddha overhears, realizes her mothers never told her about the funeral, and disappears with her location sharing turned off.
From there, the revelation spreads through both families. On the drive home from the party, seven-year-old Luca asks his parents whether Siddha’s donor died and whether his father, Mike, is the dad of Tobi and Evie’s twins. Mike had donated sperm to help them conceive years earlier.
Caroline becomes consumed by worry over Luca’s isolation after his best friend moves to Brooklyn, compounded by a rejected research grant.
She begins seeing Dr. Marcia Glassie-Greene, a local child psychologist, who advises her to stop projecting her own childhood loneliness onto her son.
Tobi Fynch, meanwhile, turns fifty and enters an identity crisis. Meeting Bex reawakens a lifelong discomfort with her female body. She orders a chest binder, wears it in her ceramics studio, and confides to Mike that she wants top surgery.
When Tobi’s visiting mother, Lynne, overhears a reference to surgery, Tobi admits she is planning a breast reduction. Evie walks in during the exchange and realizes her wife told Mike and Lynne before telling her. Evie leaves the house in a rage.
Ruth, adrift since resigning from teaching, reconnects with Florence Howe, a real estate agent who was Elliot’s childhood best friend and Ruth’s confidante during her pregnancy. Their afternoons at the empty Olive Street house turn intimate, and Ruth impulsively kisses Florence.
Siddha, in the meantime, takes a job at Barton Falls Hardware working for Elliot’s widow, Hope Shepkins, and bonds with her nine-year-old half-brothers, George and Teddy. Overwhelmed by grief, she gives herself a crude stick-and-poke tattoo of a hammer on her thigh.
Caroline discovers the raw tattoo while babysitting and quietly cleans it. At the library’s holiday book-wrapping event, Ruth confesses the kiss with Florence, and Caroline reacts with anger rather than support.
Ruth retaliates by raising Caroline’s secrecy about the tattoo, and the two friends separate.
On Christmas morning, Mike presents Caroline with a vintage red Vespa he restored with Tobi’s help. Caroline is touched, but recognizes the gesture as his habit of answering emotional friction with practical gifts.
On New Year’s Day, Ruth takes her family ice skating at the frozen town pond. Across the ice, Siddha is with George and Teddy. The thin ice over the marsh gives way and both boys fall into the freezing water.
Siddha pulls them out. Ruth skates over and helps load the boys into cars for the drive to Radclyffe Hospital.
At the emergency room, Hope Shepkins arrives and embraces her sons and Siddha. Outside the entrance, Siddha explodes at Ruth, saying her mothers lied to her and robbed her of knowing her father while he was alive. She announces she will live with Hope and her brothers.
Ruth drives to Florence’s house and ends the romantic detour, telling her the kiss came from unexamined grief and affirming her love for Wyn. She then visits Barton Falls Hardware, where Siddha is sitting by the creek.
Ruth brings a photograph of Elliot kneeling beside her pregnant belly twenty years earlier and apologizes without reservation. Siddha forgives her and agrees to come home.
At the GoldFynch warehouse sale, Tobi and Evie sit on a fire escape. Tobi explains that her desire for surgery is not a rejection of Evie but a long-delayed act of bodily authenticity. Evie admits her fear of being shut out and offers her support.
Caroline, Mike, Tobi, and Evie then attend a joint session with Dr. Glassie-Greene, who tells them to discard labels like donor and father. She names their family identity as love, care, mutual help, and expanded family.
Caroline and Ruth reconcile over a lighthearted text about the Vespa. In the epilogue, three months later, the families gather at Barton Falls Hardware for a May Day celebration on what would have been Elliot’s fifty-first birthday.
Siddha opens the enamel box left to her in the will. Inside are fifty-one quarters and a letter in which Elliot says he loved her from her first breath to his last, praises Ruth for doing the right thing, and tells Siddha there is no such thing as too much family.
The children carry a hundred biodegradable origami boats to the creek and launch them together. The boats drift toward the bend as parents and children stand side by side.
What the Novel Is Built Around
| Theme | How the Book Presents It |
|---|---|
| Family Beyond Biology | Siddha, Nina, and Jules are donor-conceived, and two households function as one extended family. A psychologist tells four parents to set aside terms like donor and father in favor of family. |
| Secrets and Their Cost | Ruth and Wyn conceal Elliot’s identity to protect Siddha from his alcoholism. When the will arrives, the concealment becomes the central rupture. Tobi’s hidden binder and surgery plans create a parallel rupture with Evie. |
| Maternal Anxiety | Caroline tracks Luca’s friendships and seeks a psychologist’s help. Ruth struggles with Siddha’s independence and with her own decisions twenty years earlier. |
| Midlife Identity and Bodily Autonomy | Tobi turns fifty, begins wearing a chest binder, and pursues top surgery. Ruth leaves teaching and questions her marriage’s balance of ambition. |
| Class and Domestic Life | Wyn’s wealthy WASP background sits beside Caroline’s and Mike’s working lives. Money, labor, and who carries emotional weight surface repeatedly in both households. |
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Characters in This Book
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Ruth Schwartz | Former kindergarten teacher, Siddha’s biological mother, and the novel’s central protagonist. |
| Wyn Huntley | Ruth’s wife, a former tech CFO who now runs Sugar Hill farm. |
| Siddha Schwartz-Huntley | Ruth’s sixteen-year-old daughter, biologically fathered by Elliot Shepkins. |
| Gilly, Roz, and Abe | Ruth and Wyn’s younger children, aged twelve, ten, and seven. |
| Caroline Caruso | Ruth’s best friend and director of Collegium Musicum at Gorman College. |
| Mike D’Amato | Caroline’s husband, a bartender and wine sales representative. |
| Luca Caruso-D’Amato | Caroline and Mike’s seven-year-old son. |
| Tobi Fynch | Mike’s cousin and co-founder of GoldFynch Pottery. |
| Evie Gold | Tobi’s wife and co-founder of GoldFynch Pottery. |
| Nina and Jules | Tobi and Evie’s five-year-old twins, conceived with Mike’s donation. |
| Elliot Shepkins | Siddha’s biological father, a tradesman and hardware store owner who dies before the story begins. |
| Hope Shepkins | Elliot’s widow and manager of Barton Falls Hardware. |
| George and Teddy Shepkins | Elliot and Hope’s nine-year-old twin sons. |
| Florence Howe | Real estate agent, Elliot’s childhood friend, and Ruth’s former confidante. |
| Bex | Nonbinary folk singer and carpenter working at Sugar Hill. |
| Dr. Marcia Glassie-Greene | Child psychologist and family consultant in Radclyffe. |
| Lynne Fynch | Mike’s aunt and Tobi’s mother. |
| Dr. Lippman | Ruth’s therapist during her college years in Madison. |
Who Is Like Family For?
The novel suits readers of contemporary literary fiction centered on domestic life and relationships rather than plot mechanics.
It is written for audiences interested in LGBTQ+ family structures, donor conception, and co-parenting arrangements.
The narrative is character-driven and told through shifting perspectives, primarily Ruth, Caroline, and Tobi.
Readers who prefer multiple viewpoints and interior reflection over fast plotting will find the structure familiar.
Those drawn to midlife reinvention, long friendships between women, and stories set in specific regional landscapes may find the Hudson Valley setting and its class contrasts of particular interest.
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Quotes from Like Family
“Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be…You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you?”
“No, Mike was not a soulmate, and Mike was not a friend. Mike was her husband. But god, how she loved that word!”
“I want people to use it until it breaks, you know? I want that to be the whole point. I mean, isn’t that always the whole point? That a pot’s going to break? That from the very first moment you hold it, you know it can’t last, not in its original form. It contains its own ending. That’s what makes it a living thing.”
“Freud said it best: life is love and work. Or something like that. And is the operative word there. You can’t have a life with one and not the other. You’ve got love to spare, god knows, but you really, really need some work. And at the risk of sounding gross and capitalist, it needs to be work that pays you. In money.”
“Having this baby would be so, so hard, Dr. Lippman responded. Harder than either of us can imagine right now. But you do have a mother, Ruth. I say “have” in the present tense because I believe now that mothers aren’t subject to the laws of time and space.”
“Behold, I have set before thee an open door.”
“Tobi and Evie wanted children to love and care for, and Mike and Caroline wanted to help them, because they’re family. Love and care. Helping. Family. That’s the message. Not ‘father,’ not ‘brother and sister.’ Just ‘family.'”
“Please don’t be hard on your mom, especially if she’s an old lady when you’re reading this. But even if she’s not, be gentle. She did the right thing.”
Books Like Like Family
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo — A multi-generational family portrait with shifting viewpoints among mothers and daughters and buried information surfacing over time.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters — Centers queer family creation, donor logistics, gender exploration, and the negotiation of non-traditional parenting roles.
The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney — Follows adult siblings and their partners through midlife choices, financial strain, and long-standing family friction.
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld — Shares sharp social observation and an elite private-school setting, here echoed in the Quaker academy Mott Valley Friends.
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett — Traces two families across decades after a single event reshapes their relationships and loyalties.
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner — Examines marriage, class, and midlife dissatisfaction through alternating perspectives.
Book Snapshot
- Genre & Subgenre: Contemporary Literary Fiction; Family Drama; LGBTQ+ Fiction
- Core Narrative Tropes: Unraveling family secrets; chosen and non-traditional family; midlife awakening; donor conception
- Tone & Atmosphere: Warm, introspective, witty, and emotionally grounded, with a strong Hudson Valley regional texture
- Primary Conflict: The fallout after Siddha learns her biological father’s identity, forcing two families to re-examine secrecy, boundaries, and loyalty
- Pacing Style: Character-driven and episodic, moving among multiple viewpoints across a single autumn-to-spring timeline
- ISBN: 978-0593978566 (ISBN-10: 0593978560)
- Pages: 336
- Book Structure: 42 numbered chapters plus an epilogue titled “Three Months Later,” preceded by a cast of characters
- Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
- Author Background: Erin O. White is the author of the memoir Given Up for You and teaches writing and literature in Massachusetts.
