There's Always Room

The table seats six. The list says nineteen. And somewhere behind the water heater, the folding table is being dragged out by its ankles again.

Every year you swear it'll be calmer. Every year, your family proves you gloriously, exhaustingly wrong. There's the group chat that never sleeps and answers a forty-message treaty with a single letter: K. There's the casserole seat-belted into the car like a paying passenger. The hug gauntlet at the front door. The seating politics that would humble a diplomat. The aunt who won't let you stop eating, the uncle broadcasting his theories from the head of the table, the annual interrogation about your love life, and the board game that nearly ends a lifelong friendship. There's the one bathroom — there is always one bathroom, regardless of the size of the house, a law of family physics as fixed as gravity.

In eighteen warm, wickedly observant comic pieces, Franny Dunmore maps the whole magnificent production: the traditions nobody can explain, the Tupperware that never finds its way home, the second group chat you were never supposed to discover, and the forty-five-minute goodbye that defies the known laws of time. She celebrates the load-bearing lie that holds the whole enterprise together — that there's always room — while never once making a joke at the expense of the empty chair.

Because underneath the chaos is the thing you'd never say in the car on the way over: that you'd be quietly, hugely devastated to miss it. That gap between not again and don't you dare stop is the whole book.

Funny enough to read aloud across the table, kind enough that you'll text your people the second you finish, this is the field guide to family chaos you didn't know you needed. No five steps to a serene holiday — the serene holiday is a brochure. Just the warm relief of recognition, and the reminder that it was never really about the chairs.

Pull up a folding chair and start reading.