This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

This provides the book’s main tension, as Frankel plants, mystery-style, a handful of possible culprits who will unravel the ever elaborate family deception. When they move to Seattle, they decide not to tell any of her friends she was born a boy. The greatest risk Frankel takes with Poppy is having her family keep her real identity a secret. What Poppy is living through is extraordinary, unimaginable, and yet one never feels she will be anything but O.K. Mom and Dad understand, the principal understands, even Grandma is on board and waiting in the wings is a wise guru of a therapist. Frankel places Poppy in a thoroughly empathetic and loving family, the kind that picks up and moves to Seattle the minute they encounter a whiff of homophobia in their town. These moments startle, and yet the book feels a little too close to home, a little too, well, safe. The parents find themselves on new and scary terrain, trying to balance Poppy’s safety and happiness in a world where she might be bullied with her need to be herself. Frankel unfolds the story more or less in chronological order: A couple (Penn and Rosie) date, fall in love, have children (five!), and then the last one (Claude) disrupts the expected order by declaring he is a girl (now Poppy). The result is a novel that feels more like a fictionalized account, in ways that are both deeply satisfying and sometimes limiting. You can almost see Frankel flipping through the family albums, looking for inspiration. The fictional family lives in Seattle, just like the author’s real family, and they come more or less from the same social class. (She recently wrote a Modern Love column for The Times about it.) Her new novel, “This Is How It Always Is,” centers on a young boy who decides he is a girl. Laurie Frankel has a son who, in first grade, decided he was a girl. One pleasure of being a novelist, I imagine, is playing out scenarios from your own life, but tweaking the characters, or setting, or maybe most satisfying, the ending. And families with secrets don't get to keep them forever.THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS By Laurie Frankel 327 pp. And it's about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts children grow but not always according to plan. Laurie Frankel's This Is How It Always Is is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. But soon the entire family is keeping Claude's secret. Kids go through phases, after all, and make-believe is fun. When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl.

He wants to bring a purse to kindergarten. One day he puts on a dress and refuses to take it off. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect.īut Claude is not like his brothers. When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy.

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel