When Your Family Business Isn’t a Family
“It was disingenuous to pretend we were all in this out of love.”
Gluten-free ice cream cones. Salted fava beans. 1kg of Slippery Elm Powder.
The Lord of the Rings
Today, the way I talk about the place—often calculated, I admit, to make people laugh—makes Strewn Earth sound a bit like a cult. The way the managers talked about it made it sound like a family. Actually, though, it was neither: It was a business.
care
after that
did
Thank god I escaped
talking Slowly, I realized I didn’t know.
Mikaella Clements is an Australian writer currently based in Berlin. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Hazlitt, The LA Review of Books, Lithub, Buzzfeed, and more. She is currently working on her first novel, a literary rom-com co-written with her wife.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Mikaella Clements
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Mikaella Clements
More by this author
Keeping Up With The Other Us
Of course there was no best. Of course they were the same. I wanted to win in any case.
More in this series
How My Parents, Who Loved Grapes, Lost Their Love of Winemaking
Others began to intrude in what had once been a mom-and-pop operation. The conversion from hobby to profession had been made.
At Sea with Scientists, I Learned What It Means to Be an Explorer
We think of explorers in terms of what they discovered—the Eureka moment, not the search. The search is imperfect and frustrating and owes you nothing.
Studying Nuclear Policy Without Being Engulfed By Fear
Like most people born just as the Cold War was ending, I learned about nuclear weapons in the past tense.