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. THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS By Laurie Frankel 327 pp.
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