I have a soft spot for Kin, and not just because it's about my people. It was a hard-won book, which helped me shift from being just an academic historian to also being a real writer. Crafting a national history from my own family history was never going to be easily done. Overlapping timelines made the writing complex, and choosing which stories to tell and which to leave was hard. But in the end I made something of which I'm still proud.