A real one, not a Disney one.” Penn’s bedtime fairytale becomes a parallel story woven through the narrative that both foreshadows and explains Claude’s growth. As Penn puts it: “This is a fairy tale, Rosie. Part I is set in Madison, Wisconsin, and details Rosie and Penn’s courtship, Claude’s conception and birth, and debuts the work of fiction Penn crafts as bedtime stories over the course of the novel. The four sections of the book are divided among three very different settings. Frankel’s depiction of the family’s realization that Claude’s behavior is not a phase is apt and realistic, partly due to her own acknowledgement of raising a transdaughter and partly due to her skill as an author who has honed her craft. Their youngest-Claude-knows from the time they can speak that they want to be a girl, wearing one of their mother’s old dresses and refusing to take it off. THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS depicts a family of seven-physician mother Rosie, writer father Penn and their five children who are-to use the phrase currently deemed appropriate but which will probably change as society becomes more or less accepting of the varied definitions of gender-assigned male at birth. As the proud father of a transdaughter myself, I looked forward to seeing my own struggles reflected in its pages, but while my daughter transitioned as an adult, the child in Frankel’s novel is prepubescent, and the book examines the controversial and timely topics that inevitably accompanying that story-from the stress it can put on a marriage to asking your children to keep secrets to the ethics of hormone suppressors. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first began reading Laurie Frankel’s novel about a mother dealing with her son’s struggle with gender definition.

This is how it always is