"How the Family Forges Us Into Persons"

The family is the first school of desire. Before we encounter the market, the school, the church, or the algorithm, we encounter the faces of the people who made us—and we learn from those faces what it means to want, to be wanted, and to belong.

This excerpt from The One and the Ninety-Nine (St. Martin's Press, 2026) explores how our earliest family relationships shape the architecture of our desires in ways we carry long into adult life—and what it takes to become free.