Things are “gayer” there, and she believes her child can be safe. She moves her family from Madison, Wisconsin, to Seattle, Washington. Treating a trans ER patient who was brutally beaten when her transness was discovered crystalizes Rosie’s fears. As Poppy starts drawing herself smaller and smaller in the family portraits she makes, her parents worry that a cruel world will make their child disappear entirely. They are eager to support their child but unsure how best to do so.Ĭlaude becomes Poppy, and it’s wonderful but not always easy. Rosie and Penn read books, consult a “multi-degreed social-working therapist-magician,” and talk to Claude’s teachers. This fourth son is only three when he begins saying that he wants to be a girl when he grows up. Rosie isn’t superstitious, but she still follows a German folkloric suggestion to conceive a girl by sticking a wooden spoon under the bed before sex. This child starts out named Claude and goes on to be named Poppy, which sends Rosie and Penn Walsh-Adams on a desperate search for the best way to raise their gender nonconforming child. The novel’s focus, however, settles upon the couple’s youngest child. Together they take on Halloween costumes and shifts in the ER and a never-ending bedtime story. The book’s third-person limited narration offers both parents’ thoughts, positioning the two collectively as the protagonist.
Parents Rosie and Penn are an ER doctor and a writer, respectively. Laurie Frankel’s third novel, This Is How It Always Is, tackles the sprawling quotidian reality of an upper middle class family of seven.
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