The S'mores coffee that arrived yesterday has my family room smelling like a campfire, in the best possible way. It is the Dubai Chocolate-adjacent kind of cozy: sweet, toasty, and very persuasive about staying put with a book.
I finished In the Shadow of Eight. I am still waiting for Kate Gosselin’s diaries, Robert Hoffman’s Kate Gosselin: How She Fooled the World. My bookstore and Barnes & Noble did not have it new, so I tracked it down on Alibris. That will be the awaited part two. Based on the pages I have read so far, my expectation is that Kate will be projecting her own delusions and other people’s issues. That is my read going in, not a verdict on a book I have not yet read.
I talked about Collin’s memoir in an earlier Bookclub conversation. This week, a video essay about his maternal grandfather, Kenton Kreider, made me revisit the older family story behind it. I went in having heard, third-hand, that Kenton was abusive. I am retracting that characterization. The material I watched does not establish that. What it offers instead is a church congregation, donated baby furniture, disputed accounts of a household under pressure, and a parking lot where a sister says the family last saw Kate.
That is a different story. It is also a reason to slow down before turning rumor into biography.
The cribs, and the account behind them
Kenton Kreider was a Pennsylvania pastor. In 2004, Kate’s congregation rallied to support the family after the birth of her sextuplets. The video essay describes the church as donating cribs before TLC cameras arrived. That detail matters to me because it puts an act of community help before the fame and the television narrative.
The explanation for why Kate and her father later became estranged is less solid. In a story attributed to unnamed sources and a former nurse, Us Weekly reported on high staff turnover and strict household rules. A separate account, repeated in the video essay, says the donated cribs were rejected because they did not match. This is a reported account, not a confirmed conversation between Kate and Kenton. I cannot tell you what either of them would say happened. I can say the image stays with me: help offered, then reportedly turned away because it did not match.
The video essay also recaps Kendra Wilber’s 2014 account to the Daily Mail. Kendra said she and Kate had not spoken in years, and described their last encounter as an ordinary moment in a church parking lot, not a planned goodbye, not a final family summit. “We didn’t leave her. She left us,” Kendra said. She did not describe a specific fight. She said her family may not have been excited enough for Kate’s ambitions, and that Kate wanted a big life they did not fit into. Those are Kendra’s words and her interpretation of the distance.
A parking lot is a painfully ordinary place for a last sighting. No slammed door. No dramatic speech. Just a moment people did not know they would later replay.
Kenton himself did not publicly explain the estrangement in the material I reviewed. That silence does not prove any particular version of events. It means we should not fill it with certainty just because the blank space makes us uncomfortable.
What Kate said, and what the family said about the show
Kate’s account is also part of the record. In the 2009 TLC special Kate: Her Story, she said the rift with her parents began before television. She described “a lot in my childhood that was not happy,” without giving specifics about her father, and said her parents supported her from afar. In that same interview, she called Jon’s late father the family’s most involved grandparent. It is a small detail, but it hints at the long distance she was describing.
The family disagreement about filming was more public. In May 2009, Kate’s brother Kevin and his wife, Jodie, appeared on CBS’s The Early Show and said they were concerned the children were being exploited. Jodie said a first season of eight episodes had grown to 40 episodes in six months, and described cameras in the children’s bedrooms. Kate later rejected her brother’s claims as untrue and money-motivated. These were competing accounts of the show’s impact, not a settled finding. They do, though, show how quickly concern inside this family could become a public fight.
The pattern that keeps coming back
Now the story reaches the next generation. In In the Shadow of Eight, Collin alleges that he was isolated from his siblings, slapped, kept in a basement bedroom, and restrained with zip ties after trying to run away. He also describes a stay at Fairmont Behavioral Health Institute, where he says he felt like a zombie. Those are Collin’s allegations. Kate disputes them; her statement, included in the book, refers to his “distorted perception of reality” and his mental-health history.
The allegations do not erase the other accounts in the family. Mady, in a 2023 Instagram story, accused Collin of physically threatening her and other immediate family members. Jon’s former partner Colleen Conrad publicly defended Collin. And Jon said in 2023 that he had not spoken to twins Mady and Cara in more than a decade. Each of these statements belongs to the person who made it. They do not combine neatly into one clean explanation.
Hannah’s recent statement added another disagreement. She said she had a relationship with her mother and other siblings, and that she did not intend to comment further on Collin’s childhood behavior or her own experiences growing up. Collin disputed her account of how long they had been out of contact. From what Hannah actually said, I did not hear an attack on her brother. I heard a boundary. Sometimes the kindest thing you can say about someone is what you decline to join.
That is the generational echo I cannot shake: a rupture described by one person at a distance, competing versions of what happened, and long silences from people at the center of the split. First, Kate and her parents, as Kendra described it. Later, Kate and some of her children, with siblings describing their relationships in different ways. It is tempting to label this generational trauma and call the case closed. I will not. A pattern can be worth noticing without pretending we know every cause.
The contract question I cannot prove
The memoir leaves me asking a sharper question about the production system around these children. I have heard the theory that a child could be excused from filming only for mental illness or another illness. If that was actually a contract term, what incentive did it create? Did Collin’s commitment fit an exception in the contract, or did the arrangement shape how his absence was explained?
I want to be exact: I do not have the contract in front of me, and I cannot verify that the clause existed or that Collin’s commitment was manufactured to satisfy it. I am not presenting either as fact. It is my question about the incentives around reality TV and the children living inside it. The appropriate accountability route is the production system and its safeguards, not speculation dressed up as an answer about a family’s private medical history.
That is where my reading stops and the harder questions begin. Maybe Kenton was not the monster I had heard about third-hand. Maybe he was a father whose help looked like interference to a daughter who needed total control of her own house. The cribs-that-didn’t-match story is unconfirmed, but it captures the ache of the whole account in one line: help, reportedly offered, rejected because it did not match.
And that parking lot? It is not proof of who was right. It is a reminder that relationships can end quietly, without the people standing there realizing they are at the last goodbye.
Thank you for spending part of your Weekend Reads with me. I am grateful for the thoughtful Bookclub conversation around Collin’s memoir, and I will return to the diaries when they finally arrive. Until then, I’m keeping my claims attributed, my questions marked as questions, and my S'mores coffee close at hand.