Whittie Writer & Cartoonist Explores Modern Kinship in New Book

Staying isolated in the face of hard times doesn’t benefit anyone, Lucido Johnson says.

“I really think that people crave purpose right now, a belief that there is a reason to be alive—and the reason is each other,” she says. 

“We do have purpose. It’s right here. It’s probably not in your Instagram feed or your to-do list, but it is across the street. It’s walking the dog. It’s in your living room. It’s just one call away. It’s at the grocery store. It’s in your workplace. It’s here.”

From Lucido Johnson’s days at Whitman honing her writing craft to across her artistic and literary career, themes of care and connection spring up over and over. Her books “Many Love” (Gallery Books, 2018) and “Dear Sophie, Love Sophie” (HarperOne, 2022) explore the complexities of building relationships and understanding oneself. Her New Yorker cartoons (created in collaboration with Sammi Skolmoski) use warm humor to point out life’s absurdities. And her popular Instagram account (@SophieLucidoJohnson) and Substack newsletter (“You’re Doing a Good Enough Job”) draw readers together through funny and sincere reflections on humanity, community and nature.

In her forthcoming book, “Kin: The Future of Family” (Atria Books, November 2025), Lucido Johnson uses interviews, research, personal stories and drawings to redefine kinship and explore the possibilities and benefits of building relationships where people show up for each other in their everyday lives.

“As we face catastrophe from all corners of the world, what do we do in our day-to-day lives to care for ourselves?” she says. “And the answer is to find ways to care for each other, because there’s not really a line between the self and the other.”

Kinship Is Essential

Lucido Johnson points to the outpouring of support for victims of the California wildfires earlier this year as an example of what people can accomplish amid hard times—whether it’s large scale, like political unrest and climate-related disasters, or more everyday challenges, like raising a family or caring for an aging parent.

“I think so many people believe that they belong to each other and want to take care of each other and show up for each other,” Lucido Johnson says. “I think we see that, actually, all the time.”

For Lucido Johnson, the seed of “Kin” was planted during a global crisis, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, she and her husband, Luke, were sharing a house with another couple in Chicago. Everyone agreed it was a good opportunity to share resources—and during the months of lockdown, they were thrilled to have more than one other person to turn to. 

When Lucido Johnson and her friend Bethany both had babies in 2021, they found even more benefits in sharing space and community.

They weren’t a radical commune, just people living in a house together, Lucido Johnson says—and she wanted to write about all the interesting ways that they and others were reimagining their lives.

She landed on the word “kin” to describe the space between friends and family.

“We have a lot of language for romantic relationships and familial relationships, but not really for these friendships and other types of relationships that are essential,” she says.

“Kin” encompasses not only those friends who feel more like family, but also peripheral kin: neighbors, co-workers, “the people you actually spend a lot of time with who are holding loose ties that help keep your life together,” Lucido Johnson says.

The foundational connections are already there, she says—so it doesn’t have to be hard to nurture relationships that make life easier.

Kinship Is Sharing

The shift from friendship to kinship might start with a run to the grocery store.

We live not only in a time of global turmoil, but also in a time of relentless tasks that leave people feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.

Lucido Johnson proposes kinship as an answer to this problem. What if, instead of neighbors going to the grocery store separately, one person could pick up the list for everyone on the block?

In her home, Lucido Johnson puts this idea into practice by offering open invitations to dinner. She and her husband love to cook, and the table is set at 6:30 every evening for whoever wants to show up. People who eat help clean up, play with Lucido Johnson’s toddler daughter or hang out for conversation.

“It’s made my life a lot easier, because it just allowed other people to pick up slack where I was going to have to take all these household tasks on myself,” Lucido Johnson says.

The concept of finding ways to share the load can also extend beyond the domestic sphere and short-term needs.

“In the larger scheme, we need to be using less plastic, we need to be driving fewer cars, we need to be taking up less space, and we need to be benefiting from the resources that are in close proximity right now,” Lucido Johnson says. “There’s this idea of, ‘If I need something, I can pay for it, and it will come from wherever it’s coming from.’ But many of the things that you need, you are already so close to.”

Kinship Is in the Little Things

If you’re not sure you have anyone emotionally close enough to become your kin, Lucido Johnson suggests looking to people literally close to you: neighbors and co-workers.

“Proximity does sort of matter sociologically, in terms of how we can connect with each other,” she says. “It’s helpful to be closer to people, because it allows you to physically show up as needed.”

Maybe you start by going for a walk and stopping to chat with someone about the weather. (“It’s a great bonding topic,” Lucido Johnson says.) Or maybe you make a big batch of cookies and leave a few at every neighbor’s door or every co-worker’s desk.

Lucido Johnson makes calendars of her Substack newsletter during the holidays, and this year she took the extras around her neighborhood. Before long, people were showing up with gifts of food, chatting with Lucido Johnson about the holiday season or stopping to ask if she was the person who made the calendar.

These small bonds can grow into something more.

“I think that people crave this,” Lucido Johnson says. “It’s usually a good bet that you’re going to find someone you can really connect with.”

When you’re ready to start turning friendship into kinship, Lucido Johnson recommends starting with running errands. Instead of making plans for lunch or hosting a dinner or even taking a walk, friends can choose to be present with each other while normalizing sharing a task.

“Just go live your life in tandem with another person, and do it regularly,” Lucido Johnson says. “You’ll find that the more we can see each other as sort of messy, imperfect, not always polite, not always thoughtful human beings—because that’s who we really are—the more we’ll be comfortable asking each other for what we really need.”

Kinship Is Honest

Shifting to a culture of kinship also means changing the ways you ask for, give and receive help.

Our culture doesn’t typically encourage asking for help. So requests can get tangled up in complicated feelings of burden, debt and obligation. 

“We hoard our asks as if they are so precious, and you can only ask when something’s a real emergency,” Lucido Johnson says. “That’s just not sustainable.”

But she also encourages being honest when you can’t help someone else—another thing that’s not a norm in American culture.

“I think what will be central to us having deeper and more meaningful relationships with people is radical honesty around what you need in each moment and also what you can give,” she says, referring to Brad Blanton’s book “Radical Honesty.” “Unfortunately, those things are not constants. They’re going to change all the time, so you have to keep having conversations.”

Boundaries are another frequently misunderstood aspect of relationships. Lucido Johnson likes psychologist Becky Kennedy’s definition: Boundaries are something you do when someone else takes an action.

“Instead of thinking about boundaries—and asking and responding—as a calculation, or as one-size-fits-all, think of it more as a river that will be different day-to-day and moment to moment,” Lucido Johnson says.

People don’t often engage in this process of “asking for help, giving help, refusing help, setting boundaries, holding boundaries,” she says. Learning to do it can be uncomfortable, but it leads to stronger relationships—though she advises being selective about the relationships you attempt it in.

“You shouldn’t try to do it with everyone immediately all the time,” Lucido Johnson says. “Pick some people who you think it would be safe to practice with. Experiment with your friendship, and see how it goes.”

Kinship Is for Caregivers

As the seed of “Kin” blossomed into the book, Lucido Johnson kept returning to the challenges of caregiving—whether for children or for ill or aging family members—and the ways that relationships change when someone becomes a caregiver.

“Caregiving feels like it shouldn’t be that isolating, because you are around someone else all the time. But you lose the person that you were because you’re caring so much for your parent or your child,” she says. “In all the interviews I did, I just heard that over and over again.”

In these isolating times of life, people need relationships more than ever. “People who are alone and people who are caretakers really need each other and benefit from connection with each other so deeply,” she says. 

Lucido Johnson encourages everyone to build bridges toward people who are in different caregiving situations than they are. If you have a friend who’s caring for an elderly parent, reach out—they likely desperately need help but aren’t going to ask for it.

If you don’t have kids, get to know your friends’ kids—the kids will love it, and so will their parents. If you have kids, figure out ways to stay connected to your friends who don’t.

Kinship crosses generational boundaries as well as caregiving ones, Lucido Johnson says: “It’s important for us to spend time with each other in all stages of our lives.”

Kinship Is Love

When Lucido Johnson teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she ends each class by saying “I love you” to her students. 

“I see the way it makes them feel by the look on their faces. They know I mean it; I really mean it,” she says. “And there’s just this softening.”

Ultimately, we build kin by softening to each other, she says—not through hustling and hard work, but by slowing down and finding gentleness, forgiveness and understanding.