THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS

Laurie Frankel is the author of three novels, This Is How It Always Is, Goodbye For Now, and The Atlas Of Love. She lives with her family on a very steep hill in Seattle, but she’s an east coaster at heart. She is also a baseball fan, a soup maker, a theater lover, a yoga practicer, a comma expert, and a huge reader.

Author Website

New York Times Bestseller
The Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick
People Magazine’s Top 10 Books of 2017
Amazon’s Best Books of 2017: Top 20
Amazon’s Best Literature and Fiction of 2017
Bustle’s 17 Books Every Woman Should Read From 2017
PopSugar’s Our Favorite Books of the Year (So Far)
Refinery29’s Best Books of the Year So Far
BookBrowse’s The 20 Best Books of 2017
Pacific Northwest Book Awards Finalist
The Globe and Mail‘s Top 100 Books of 2017
Longlisted for 2019 International DUBLIN Literary Award

“Every once in a while, I read a book that opens my eyes in a way I never expected.” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine book pick)

“It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think.” —Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies

“Deeply satisfying…An intimate family story…Day-to-day parenting dilemmas are where Frankel shines.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Brave, complicated, occasionally horrifying and frequently very funny…Frankel is a first-rate storyteller.”—Seattle Times

“This Is How It Always Is isn’t only a novel about the challenges of life with an atypical child. It’s a story about the challenges of parenting and love, period…This beautiful story is deeply personal, a heart-rending glimpse of an author writing her way to understanding.”—BookPage

“A bold, honest, heartbreaking story about the choices parents make, and how life goes on, but not always according to plan. This must-read novel… is the perfect pick for book clubs” —PopSugar

“Sharp and surprising. This is a wonderfully contradictory story—heartwarming and generous, yet written with a wry sensibility.” —Publishers Weekly (“Pick of the Week,” starred review)

“Well-plotted, well-researched, and unflaggingly interesting…As thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Laurie Frankel writes with more heart than anyone I can think of…With emotional acuity, admirable bravery, utter compassion, and complete understanding, she’s created a family attempting to forge a path through one of life’s most mystifying challenges: how to define what it is that makes your child who he or she is: unique, beloved, and whole. This is a novel everyone should read. It’s brilliant. It’s bold. And it’s time.”  —Elizabeth George, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Banquet of Consequences

1. How do the epigraphs help prepare the reader for the many crossroads the Walsh-Adams family will have to face? What about the first word of the novel, “but”?

2. When Rosie and Penn first go to see Mr. Tongo about Claude, he asks them to divide behaviors into “boy” and “girl” columns. Do you think their conclusions are accurate? Are they fair? Discuss what you think it means to be a man, a woman, or “something else.”

3. In what ways does the book tackle typical definitions of boys and girls, men and women? Did it change your view of gender and identity as you read?

4. When Rosie first takes Poppy on playdates with other girls, the moms begin telling her how brave she is. “Rosie appreciated the support but wasn’t sure parenting ever really qualified as brave—or maybe it always did—because it’s not like you had a choice.” How are each of the characters brave? Discuss how (or if) parenting requires acts of bravery.

5. When Claude begins to voice his love of dresses, Rosie tells us, “Didn’t you know then, the doctors said later? Weren’t you listening?” Do you think our expectations of people, such as Rosie and Penn’s expectations of Claude, get in the way of us actually listening to them? Knowing them?

6. After Jane Doe’s trauma, Rosie thinks, “Head colds should be tolerated. Children should be celebrated.” What is the difference between tolerance and acceptance? Acceptance and celebration? Discuss how language, down to the pronouns we use, affects the way we interact with people different from ourselves.

7. When Rosie feels guilt for forcing Roo to move, Carmelo tells her, “Parents choose one kid over another all the time.” Do you agree with this statement? How about Rosie’s earlier conclusion that “of course you could uproot a whole family of seven for the needs of just one of them because that’s what family means”?

8. “They never planned to keep Claude a secret. It was an accident. It was an accident plus opportunity plus special circumstances.” Do you think Penn and Rosie are hypocrites for keeping Poppy’s secret, and expecting the rest of the family to do the same? Are they truly to blame, or was the secret forced on all of them?

9. After Poppy’s secret is revealed, Rosie and Penn have an argument about how to move forward. Penn says, “As parents, we make a thousand decisions a year with life altering impact whose implications our kids couldn’t possibly get their heads around. That’s our job. That’s what parenting is.” Rosie counters with, “She’s got to be lost for a bit, and she can’t be lost if we’re leading her out of the woods.” Where do you fall in this argument?

10. When Rosie and Penn discuss what course Poppy should take before puberty, Rosie says: “When a little girl wants to wear jeans and play soccer, her parents are thrilled, but when a little boy wants to wear a dress and play dolls, his parents send him to therapy and enroll him in a study.” Are young boys more constrained by gender stereotypes than young girls? Does the weight of gendered expectations shift from one gender to another as we grow up? If so, when? Consider what Rosie says just a few pages later: “You think Poppy would be the only woman to hate the way she looks? All women hate the way they look.”

11. When Rosie speaks to Mr. Tongo after Poppy is outed, he tells her: “For you, Poppy with a penis isn’t any more or less variant than any of your other kids’ wonderful quirks, and you love them all no matter what, and you just wake every day and raise them up. But that doesn’t help Poppy live anywhere in the world besides your house. No wonder she won’t leave her bedroom.” Did Rosie and Penn contribute to Poppy’s identity crisis by sheltering her from judgment?

12. In what ways are we as a society trapped in gender stereotypes? Do we make children less free by assigning them a label, and things to go with that label, so early in life? Discuss the differences in freedom experienced by Americans and Thai people as shown in the novel.

13. Discuss the ways in which Rosie and Claude discover both their immense privilege and their forced conformity when they get to know Thai culture and people.

14. In the penultimate, fairy tale chapter, the witch tells Grumwald that he must share his story, that “story is the best magic there is.” What is the importance of sharing stories? Do secrets have their place as well, or do you agree that “secrets make everyone alone”?

15. Think about the standard fairy tale structure—in what ways is this novel a fairy tale? Is it the tale of Penn and Rosie, or Poppy? Their family? Or do you consider it another kind of story altogether?

16. When Penn decides to box up the family photos after their move, he does so because “Poppy’s childhood did matter, and so did Claude’s, but Penn bubble wrapped them all back up anyway until he could find a way to tell this story.” With the publication of The Adventures of Grumwald and Princess Stephanie, does he succeed in telling their family story? What do you think of his choice to make their story public?

17. When comforting Poppy, Ben says, “Fitting in and being normal doesn’t exist.” How does the novel continuously challenge the idea of “normal”?

Once Upon a Time, Claude Was Born

But first, Roo was born. Roosevelt Walsh-Adams.

They had decided to hyphenate because—and in spite—of all the usual reasons but mostly so their firstborn could have his grandfather’s name without sounding too presidential, which seemed to his parents like a lot of pressure for a six-pound, two-ounce, brand-new tiny human. First Roo was born, all pink and sticky and loud and miraculous. Then Ben was born. Then they debated and deliberated and decided just one more and therefore got twins—Rigel and Orion—who were no doubt going to voice hostility about their names when they became older than four, especially when Rigel found out he was named after the constellation’s toe, but who for the moment were too little and too loud to care. The leap from two to four felt astronomical, so their parents had turned to the heavens.

All of which was why, despite being a woman of considerable science, a disciple of logic and reason, a person grounded firmly in the right half of her right mind, and besides all that a doctor who knew better, Rosie Walsh was spending the fifteen minutes immediately preceding the kickoff of Claude dragging her bed from its spot on the wall into the middle of the room so that it faced east-west rather than north-south. The Talmud, her mother reported, was very clear that many sons were born to a man whose bed was facing north, and though Rosie doubted it sincerely, along with most of what the Talmud offered, she couldn’t take the chance. She’d also quietly served salmon to her husband for lunch and, though of course they were adults, chocolate-chip cookies, German folklore prescribing red meat and salty snacks for men in need of heirs and afternoon delight for those desirous of daughters. The same website also suggested putting a wooden spoon under the bed to conceive a girl, and she did, then felt like an idiot and threw it on the dresser then thought Penn would mock her—and rightly—if he saw it there so stashed it the only place close at hand: under the bed. Couldn’t hurt.

The sources, dubious and dubiouser, also recommended missionary position, and she was happy to oblige. Missionary position was, as far as she could tell, like vanilla ice cream: purported to be boring and chosen only by passionless, unimaginative, exhausted people but really the best one. She liked to look at Penn’s face so close that it split into pieces like a modernist painting. She liked the length of his front pressed against the length of hers. She felt that people who needed to do it upside down and backward from behind—or who added candied bacon or smoked sea salt or pieces of raw cookies to their ice cream—were probably compensating for a product that was inferior to begin with.

The dubious sources also recommended that the woman refrain from orgasm. But you could only take these things so far.

Once upon a time, Dr. Rosalind Walsh and her husband had had sex that started spontaneously and uncontrollably, sex that demanded itself, sex they had for any number of reasons but also because they really had no choice. Now, with four sons and two jobs, the sex was better but less inevitable. More evitable? Proceeded, in any case, by light planning and a conversation rather than the tearing off of clothing and slamming into walls. Rosie was working the night shift at the hospital that week. Penn worked from home. They ate lunch, and then he did some research for his book while she worked out, and then she got a spoon, pulled the bed into the center of the room, and took off all her clothes.

Penn sat on the edge of the bed, still wearing his reading glasses, still holding a highlighter in one hand and an article on World War II food shortages in the other. “The last thing I want to do is dissuade you from what’s about to go down.” He put away his article, took off his glasses and then his clothes, and climbed in next to her. “But you realize this is how we got into this mess in the first place.”

“Trying for a girl?” It was true. A surely-this-time girl was how they’d talked themselves into more after Ben.

“Getting naked in the middle of the day,” said Penn.

“What mess?” She smiled.

“Have you seen the rec room this week?”

“I never go in the rec room.”

“Mess would be a generous term. Mess conveys the level of disaster but not the degree of danger. If the rec room were an airport, its security level would be red.”

“Always,” she said, kissing his mouth and then his neck and then his mouth some more.

“Always,” he agreed, from around her tongue.

A short time later, but not too short, Claude happened, in the way these things do, though none of the three of them knew it at the time. It always struck Rosie that it would be a useful human evolution if the female could feel the sperm enter the egg. That way she could stop drinking and eating sushi and the good kind of cheese a whole month or more before she generally actually got around to doing so. Such an important part of life, conception, and you missed it altogether. Also once upon a time, sex was followed by napping in a heap together, tangled legs still tingling, or by deep, meaningful philosophizing late into the night, or sometimes by more sex. Now Penn fetched back his food shortages article and gave himself seven minutes to read it nakedly against the headboard before going down to start dinner for thirty-five minutes before driving to preschool to fetch Rigel and Orion. Rosie got dressed and then ready for work and then went to the bus stop to meet Roo and Ben. All the while, Claude worked quietly at becoming, first arriving together and then, in the days and weeks and months to come, dividing and dividing and dividing.

*   *   *

What people always said to Rosie was, “What are you, Catholic?” though without raising their voices at the end like you do when you’re really asking a question. Or they said, pretending to be joking, “You know there are ways to prevent this sort of thing.” Or they said, “Better you than me,” which they needn’t, since this was obviously true, or they said, “Are they all yours?” They all were. A mom at a PTA meeting the year before had taken Rosie aside to advise her not to tack condoms to a bulletin board next to the bed, no matter how convenient a storage solution that seemed, a lesson she confessed, nodding at a first-grader in the corner licking paste off his fingers, she had learned the hard way. Making a family seemed just as intimate to Rosie as the usual kickoff to that process and just as impolite to discuss—never mind openly judge—in polite conversation with acquaintances. But that’s what happened to her, usually several times a week. And that’s what was happening at the bus stop while she waited for Roo and Ben and one half of almost-Claude raced frantically for the other half.

“I don’t know how you do it.” Heather. Her neighbor. This was another thing people always said, criticism disguised as compliment.

Rosie laughed. Fake laughed. “Well. You know.”

“No, I mean seriously.” But she did not mean seriously. “I mean, I guess Penn doesn’t have a job. But you do.”

“Penn works from home,” Rosie said. Again. This was not their first time through this particular conversation. They had it every time the bus was late. Which was every time it snowed. Which was every day some months. She thought Madison Wisconsin’s Public Schools should specially train their bus drivers for snowy conditions—was this not just common sense?—but apparently she was all alone with this idea. Now it was September and hot and smelled like a late-afternoon thunderstorm, so who knew why the bus was late.

“I mean, I know he works.” Heather started almost every sentence with “I mean,” which Rosie felt was implied. “But it’s not a job.”

“Writing’s a job.” Penn’s work in progress—he called it DN for Damn Novel—was not yet feeding them, but he wrote diligently, every day. “It’s just not a nine-to-five sort of job.”

“Does that really count?”

“My job isn’t nine to five.” She looked at her watch. In fact, she had to be at the hospital in just more than an hour. Night shifts were brutal but easier to schedule around. Sometimes, it was just less painful to forgo sleep than to try to find child care for all the early dismissals and vacations and holidays and staff developments and parent-teacher conference days. It was also true that nights in the ER were often more peaceful than nights at home with her family. Sometimes they even involved less blood.

“Yeah, but I mean, you’re a doctor,” Heather was saying.

“So?”

“So doctor’s a real job.”

“So is writer.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” Heather said again, shaking her head. And then added, giggling, “Or why.”

In fact, how was an easier question than why. How was the same answer as it is for all impossible things you do anyway. One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. All for one and one for all. Anyway, some cliché with the word “one” in it, ironic since it had been so long since she was just a one. She herded the boys—some of the boys—toward the car. If she was going to have to have this conversation with Heather at the bus stop every day, she might just start picking the kids up from school. Driving to and from the bus stop seemed absurd to her. Wasn’t the point of the bus to bring kids from their home to the school? She loved their sprawling old farmhouse, their fifteen acres of rangy, overgrown land, going ceaselessly to seed. There was a barn that was only the memory of a barn, a stream that was mysterious and wet enough to be fun, but not deep or fast enough to worry about. The house was designed for a family of farmers, a family with lots of children who rose before dawn to help milk cows or slop livestock or whatever it was farm children did. Rosie and Penn had nothing to milk nor any animals beyond the puppy (Jupiter, a present for the twins’ fourth birthday), but they did, more frequently than not, have children up before dawn. Those children needed lots of bedrooms, and the farmhouse had plenty, plus a perfect nursery off the master which smelled perpetually of talcum powder and was painted yellow, just in case the baby was a girl one of these days. The floors were not even. The walls were not soundproof. The water took a long time to be hot. But Rosie loved the rough-and-tumbleness of the house, which matched the rough-and-tumbleness of her family. Among other things, when the molding got nicked—and it did—no one cared. Some days though, plain old suburbia and a cul-de-sac at the top of which a bus stopped seemed easier. Some days, she just didn’t have the energy. This day she felt tired. She didn’t know why. But she needed to shake it off anyway. Her workday had not yet begun.

At home, she proceeded with the business of one foot, one day, one for all. Penn kissed the boys hello, kissed her goodbye, went off to fetch Rigel and Orion. She took over dinner prep—sautéing the vegetables Penn had chopped, seasoning the rice Penn had boiled, grilling the shrimp Penn had marinated. (She did not yet know that the racing-together Claude halves precluded any chance that avoiding red meat would beget a girl.) While the beans simmered, she emptied lunch boxes, checked folders, sorted forms. While the sauce reduced, she finished washing dishes from the night before. While she dried them, she interrupted the roller-skating contest Roo and Ben were holding in the living room three times. (It wasn’t that she finally succeeded in getting them to stop. It was that she finally succeeded in not caring anymore.)

Then Roo set the table. Then Ben poured water into water glasses. Then Penn, Rigel, and Orion came back in, all three of them wet and emotional, Penn from the traffic, which he reported was a mess because of the thunderstorm, Rigel and Orion from something having to do with a sand table that Rosie couldn’t make out but made sympathetic noises toward anyway. If traffic was bad, she needed to leave early for work. If she needed to leave early for work, she needed to leave now. Penn pulled the shrimp from the grill and the rice from the pot, threw both in with the vegetables in the wok, combined sauce and beans, and dumped some of all of the above into a giant to-go container, added a spoon, and shoved it into Rosie’s hands as she checked to see how many of the many things she absolutely must not forget had actually made it into her bag. Some. She gave quick kisses all around and headed for the car. If traffic was as bad as Penn said, she’d be able to eat dinner on the way to the hospital.

That was how. One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. All for one. It wasn’t so much that she and Penn had set out to practice Zen marriage equality and perfect-balance parenting. It was just that there was way more to do than two could manage, but by their both filling every spare moment, some of what needed to got done.

One good turn deserves another. Two heads are better than one.

Why was a harder question. Rosie thought about it all the way to the hospital, not that day, but 257 days later on the one when Claude was born. Labor had begun in earnest during dinner, though she’d known it was coming all morning and afternoon. Her feet itched peculiarly just before contractions started. She knew that sensation from long experience and had figured the baby would come the next day or even the one after that, so even though the contractions came closer and harder, she made dinner. But between passing the salad around and actually finishing the pasta, contractions had gone from every seven minutes to every three. Penn said, “So, how about dessert?” Rosie said, “Instead, maybe the hospital.”

How they were going to get home was an open question, but for the moment, they all still fit in one car. Rosie installed herself in the front seat, calmly but with no little effort. Penn grabbed the bags. They weren’t for Rosie, who needed so little. She had never been the type to prepare a soundtrack or a collage or a special pillow for the delivery room, but by now she realized that even the handful of things she’d brought the first few times were unnecessary. No, the bags were for her mother. They contained provisions to spend hours and perhaps days on end in a waiting room with four small, giddy boys—books, trains, LEGOs, glue sticks, juice boxes, granola bars, stuffies, blankies, and particular pillows. Rosie did not need a special pillow for the hospital. This was the difference between her and her sons.

One boy’s trash is another boy’s treasure. Back to square one.

All the way to the hospital while the kids sang Peter Pan in their car seats and boosters—their babysitter was starring in her high school musical—and Penn squeezed her hand and pretended, unsuccessfully, to be nonchalant by obeying all posted speed limits, and she resisted the temptation to tell him to hurry the hell up, Rosie was thinking one word over and over: Poppy. If the baby was a girl—and surely, surely it had to be: she had eaten fish and cookies; she had had sex in the afternoon facing east; she had done the thing with the spoon, and besides, it was her turn—she would name her Poppy.

They had had the name picked out from the first pregnancy. Rosie had had it for even longer, since one dark day sitting on her little sister’s hospital bed while their parents were in the cafeteria taking a break. Rosie was braiding Poppy’s wig hair and Poppy was braiding Poppy’s doll’s hair when she said, out of nowhere, “I’ll never have a little girl whose hair I get to braid.” Her voice was raspy. Rosie knew now it was from the chemotherapy, but at the time it seemed like something inside her little sister was fighting to get out—and winning—a goblin or a witch or a demon, something that was already breaking through in snatches here and there: a croaking voice, red rolling eyes, bruises that raised slowly then seemed to spread and multiply as if peeling back from a sea of purple skin roiling just beneath her ever more delicate surface. Rather than being frightened, Rosie found this idea comforting. She welcomed the demon on its way out of her sister because it was becoming increasingly clear that Poppy could not survive this terrible, unspeakable, unthinkable disease, but maybe the demon could. Demon Poppy seemed much stronger. Demon Poppy had more fight in her.

“Will you take care of Clover for me?” Poppy croaked. Like all the children in the Walsh home, Poppy’s doll was named for a flower.

Rosie nodded. It was all she could manage. But then Poppy’s regular voice came back: “Where should we go on vacation?”

“When?”

“When I get out of here.”

“I dunno.” The only place they’d ever been on vacation so far was their grandparents’ house, which smelled like basement. “Where do you want to go?”

“Siam,” Poppy said immediately.

“Siam?”

“Like The King and I.” The hospital had a poorly stocked video library of which that was the highlight. And Poppy had a lot of lying-around time.

“We’ll go everywhere,” Rosie promised. “As soon as you’re out. Well, we probably have to wait four years till I get my license. Is Siam in driving distance?”

“I dunno. Probably.” Poppy smiled happily. “You’re such a good hair braider.” It was the best thing about cancer it turned out. Poppy’s wig hair was much longer and less tangled than her real hair. “Your daughter’s going to be so lucky.”

At that very moment, Rosalind Walsh, aged twelve, decided two things: her daughter would have long hair, like really long, like long enough to sit on, and she would name her Poppy. Eventually, Rosie discovered Siam was now called Thailand, but it was several lifetimes later before she got there, and then it was not for vacation. This was the last time she was ever alone with her sister.

All the way to the hospital, while Penn murmured, “Breathe, breathe,” and Roo sang, “I gotta crow,” and Ben and Rigel and Orion cawed back at the tops of their little boy voices, “Er-er-er-errrrr,” Rosie whispered, “Poppy. Poppy. Poppy. Poppy.”

Twenty minutes after they pulled up at the front door, the baby was ready.

“Push,” said the doctor.

“Breathe,” said Penn.

“Poppy,” said Rosie. “Poppy. Poppy. Poppy.”

Was that why? Was she just trying endlessly to make a daughter to fulfill an ancient dream of her sister’s, a ten-year-old’s dream at that? Did she believe this daughter would grow up and be, at ten, the little girl she’d lost, Poppy herself, picking up where Poppy had left off, fulfilling all the promise of that stymied, hacked-off, stubbed-out little life? As long as she kept her womb full, might Poppy, some version of Poppy—some waiting, watchful, wandering Poppy demon—gather up all her errant atoms and come home again? Was it creepy to imagine your dead sister taking up residence in your uterus? Wasn’t it purported to be a sign of insanity to do the same thing over and over expecting different results?

One card short of a deck. One waffle short of a stack. One horse short of a … group of horses.

Or was it some long-bred, deep-sown conviction that the more children the better because you never knew when you might lose one? They had all been so broken when Poppy died, Rosie and her mom and dad. One was not enough. One was always out of balance. It was no longer two against two. There was no longer anyone to play with, to run to, to spare. Her mother, she knew, saw double, saw Poppy always at the edges, in Rosie’s shadow, at Rosie’s side during school plays and dances and graduation ceremonies, Poppy just behind Rosie and Penn at the wedding, Poppy panting quietly at Rosie’s side while her babies were all being born. Even when Rosie’s father left the world just before Roo came into it, her mother saw Poppy’s ghostly outline alongside Rosie’s swollen belly at graveside, quietly weeping for all that was lost, and it wasn’t just their father. At least then, it was one against one again. Balance restored.

One is the loneliest number. Never put all your eggs in one basket.

So maybe that was why. Or maybe Rosie and Penn just liked babies, their promise and chaos and mess, the way babies all started the same and almost instantly became entirely different. Rosie loved the high-pitched pandemonium of her big, sprawling family, muddled love filling up their farmhouse-clubhouse, a cacophony only she could make out, a whirling storm with her and Penn, grinning together, spinning together, at the center.

“Push,” said the doctor.

“Breathe,” said Penn.

“Poppy,” said Rosie.

And then, soon, “It’s a boy! A healthy, beautiful, perfect, impatient baby boy,” the doctor said. “Fast little guy. Good thing you didn’t hit traffic.”

One fell swoop, Rosie thought. Once upon a time.

Takes one to know one. A baby brother. At least the boys would know what to do.

Copyright © 2017 by Laurie Frankel