Everybody has basically the same family, it’s just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

Coupland’s line treats “family” less as a unique, idealized unit and more as a set of recurring roles and tensions—parents, children, caretakers, outsiders; love, obligation, rivalry, disappointment—that appear across households in different arrangements. The phrasing suggests a generational, late-20th-century sensibility: divorce, blended families, chosen families, and nontraditional domestic structures may look novel, yet the underlying emotional patterns remain familiar. The quote’s wry universality also undercuts the tendency to see one’s own family as exceptionally dysfunctional or exceptionally special, implying that what varies is the configuration, not the basic human material. It’s both consoling (you’re not alone) and slightly bleak (the patterns repeat).