November - This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS should be required reading for all humans. It tells a beautiful story and feels like a roadmap for dealing with life's tough issues. It shows us how to love and how to be human. And it is filled with hope.
There is so much anger, and the world feels so divided that hope seems hard to come by lately. So, I love that this book takes on gender identity, a subject that can be divisive in certain circles, and reminds us that we are all struggling with what it means to be our true selves. Laurie Frankel renews our spirit and our faith in humanity.
I fell in love with the whole family, Penn Adams, Rosie Walsh, and their five children. I wanted to be their neighbor. I wanted to be a part of their Dueling Dinners and send all our kids to next door to eat pizza while we prepared a more sophisticated menu for the adults and drank wine.
I want to be like Rosie. I want to parent with her fearlessness. Or at least as if I were fearless because, of course, there is fear because that is parenting. As she says, we make huge decisions on behalf of our children with limited information, and there is often no way to know if we are doing the right thing. We can forget that sometimes the easy life might not be the same as the best life.
Like a bonus track on an album, Frankel weaves in a fairytale with the adventures of Prince Grumwald and Princess Stephanie as a bedtime story, metaphor, and comic relief. So it's a book about family, parenting, love, worry, and acceptance, with some Buddhism and some fascinating fish facts.
Also, it contains this nugget of truth that I will take with me for the rest of my life and repeat at least one Tuesday per month. "It's not a book club if there isn't wine."
This book is funny and charming and delightful and deep. It's a parenting manual and a life-affirming escape. Read it.
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