What does a famous writer do when he has a genre crisis, his girlfriend has left, and no books are written because he doesn’t know what to write about? The hero of the novel “Family as a Family”—David Fonkinos himself, but maybe not—goes out into the street and starts talking to the first person he meets—Madeleine Jaquette, a former dressmaker at the Chanel Fashion House and an employee of Karl Lagerfeld. The writer's next novel will be a biography of Madeleine - seemingly terribly ordinary (as any publishing marketing director would say) - and at the same time a biography of her descendants, the Martin family: who doesn't want to get into the book? The Marten family is a family like a family, and it has its own difficulties and sorrows: the decline of love, the threat of dismissal, boredom, burnout. And the writer now has a new role: an impartial observer, a provocateur and an agent of change. Well, a lot of changes will happen - members of the Marten family will have meetings with those who disappeared, but were never forgotten, a new mutual understanding, a revival of love and self-confidence. What lies ahead for a writer who has undertaken to depict the lives of very real people in a literary manner is a different question. For the first time in Russian!