Dear All,

Please forgive me for appearing here without a large family to claim for myself. (Though "large" is relative; with one biological son and two stepchildren, I still feel like I live in a zoo, and therefore tremendously admire your hardiness.)

I am writing you today because I am wondering if any of you know a very large family - say, a dozen or more children - that lives in New York City, and if so, whether it'd be willing to be profiled in New York Magazine. I realize that people are shy about the media (they should be), and would therefore take as many steps as possible to ensure that the story proceeded in a comfortable (and hopefully beneficial) manner: We'd all spend time together first, to make sure we got along; I'd agree to whatever ground rules worked best; I'd make sure people could strike things from the record if they said something they believed, in retrospect, were best left private, etc.

My interest in doing this story is twofold:
1. I believe most television representations of large families are caricatures (whereas I have 6000 words at my disposal, which is quite a lot of room for nuance.)
2. Most large families depicted by the media live in rural or suburban areas. How a large family gets on in New York City, with its limited space and crazy-quilt of school options, is an entirely different matter. And I'd love to explore this.

Would anyone out there be willing to help me out? If so, I'd collapse in gratitude.

Thanks so much, and again, please pardon the intrusion from an interloper.

Jennifer Senior
Contributing Editor
New York Magazine
jennifer.senior@nymag.com