Laurie Frankel

Laurie Frankel writes novels (reads novels, teaches other people to write novels, raises a small person who reads and would like someday to write novels) in Seattle, Washington where she lives on a nearly vertical hill from which she can watch three different bridges while she's staring out her windows between words.

Frankel's latest novel is This Is How It Always Is.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I read serially. Almost all novels. I finish one and start the next immediately. It is my greatest pleasure and has been since I learned to read in the first place.

Right now I am reading an advanced copy of the almost-out-but-not-yet new one from Lauren Grodstein called Our Short History. It’s heartbreaking and brilliant and hysterical, and I’m only on page 25. Her first novel, Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love, is one of my all-time favorites.

I recently finished Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder. It’s timely historical fiction, a neat trick, with two terrific characters at its heart. It’s about a girl who seems not to have eaten anything in four months yet is perfectly healthy, but when a nurse shows up to verify this miracle, the child immediately and rapidly starts to die. What’s going on here is nearly as interesting as how and why and what’s to be done about it.

And I just read two wonderful books with nearly the same title. Brit Bennett’s The Mothers is fascinatingly narrated in the first-person plural by the women who are the church elders and community backbone. They tell the story of three friends in the aftermath of a teen pregnancy that’s neither comedy nor tragedy nor easy nor like anything else I’ve ever read.

Meantime, Yvvette Edwards’s The Mother is about a woman watching the trial of the man who murdered her son, how she survives, who she must take on in order to do so. Engrossing and important and heartbreaking. Both books are about motherhood, obviously, but also family, race, class, identity, and being female in the world.

Learn more about the book and author at Laurie Frankel's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Laurie Frankel and Calli.

My Book, The Movie: This Is How It Always Is.

The Page 69 Test: This Is How It Always Is.

--Marshal Zeringue