Ambiguity and Story editing, discussing This is How it Always is

Ambiguity and Story Editing.

By Jamie Harper

As a gender nonconforming child who grew up to be, well, still gender nonconforming, I felt a lot of different emotions in reading Laurie Frankel’s This is How it Always is. I had a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, both good and not-so-good, but what I have decided to focus on for the blog this week is ambiguity and the concept of story editing. Frankel makes it clear in her author’s note at the end of this book that the story, while based on some of her experiences as a mother with a trans child, is also firmly a work of fiction, which means she possessed the ability to tell the exact story she wished to tell, without being as beholden to the ideas of “truth” that many memoirists must grapple with, and be ready to defend. As such, Frankel could form her story and the way it is told, and utilize ambiguity of storytelling, in ways that allowed her to neatly parallel the editing and changing of life and the expression of personality and personal history.

Throughout this novel there is much debate between parents Rosie and Penn about how to handle the fact that their child is trans, in a world that is dominantly unfriendly to such children. Should they disclose this incredibly personal and private fact about their child to everyone, to only some people, to no one? How much of her story should they edit out, and who gets to make that decision? The optimist, writer father, the practical, medical mother, the older siblings, young Poppy herself?

In reading a story, the reader implicitly wants to trust their narrator, which is often what makes or breaks a memoir, or genre stories such thrillers and procedurals. When the reader feels intentionally betrayed by the narrator, they lose trust in not only that narrator, but in the author and any messages, or morals, they may be trying to get across in their work. Then you have stories like This is How it Always is and Forget Sorrow, which both portray stories from narrators that place trust in the story’s truth, for different reasons. In Forget Sorrow, we are given a generational story told through the passing on of the family history, a father telling his daughter about the past. Here, Yang as the narrator presents the story as true, because she has no real proof otherwise and must place faith in the word of her father, but we as readers do not. We can question moments that seem impossible, or themes that would suggest embellishment or a twisting of fact, based upon whatever questions we may have of the father and his motives. In This is How it Always is, on the other hand, we have a fully fictional story, wherein we are blatantly reminded of the power of editing. Penn often tells and retells fairytales and bedtime stories, changing them as needed (p.187), while working on his novel and striving to find a balance with Rosie in how much information to give out about Poppy. This informs the reader that, this story too was edited, edited for a peaceful, hopeful, “happy ending,” most likely for Frankel and her own daughter. Throughout the narrative, Rosie is constantly reminded of the ambiguity of life by both her storytelling husband, and the overly peppy, yoda-like guru of Mr. Tongo (suffer or suffer, there is no do not), which in turn reminds the reader of not only life’s ambiguity, but that of novels. “Yes, it’s true. And no, I made it all up,” Frankel says in her author’s note, much as Penn tells a bereaved Poppy that “just because it’s made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t real” (p. 216). Just because Frankel created a whole new narrative out of some of her experiences as a mother of a trans child, doesn’t mean the story is not true, in one way, shape, or form for someone out there going through a similar experience. So should we as readers invalidate or distrust her messages and efforts just because we recognize her narrator as unreliable, both in that it is a close third focusing on the more selfish mother, and that it is a fictional piece rather than a memoir, as we might do with the father in Forget Sorrow  or the author of a crime novel that straight up lies to it’s reader (an example being the The Wave at Hanging Rock by Gregg Dunnett)?

Personally, I don’t think so. As the Walsh-Adams family discovers, there is a middle road to walk. A middle road based on ambiguity, be it the ambiguity of a story, like Penn’s published book about Prince Grumwald and Princess Stephanie, or the ambiguity of a life history, like that of the family collective, or of gender, like what Poppy chooses to settle on for her gender “label” (p. 285)

There are moments when it becomes clear to gender nonconforming readers that Frankel was cherry picking the subjects and realities depicted in her story and sort of diluting them as a means of making them more palatable to a broader readership (*coughs* Mr. Tongo *coughs*), but she was also leaving it ambiguous enough that those who know better, would know. An example of this can be found in her depiction of Rosie and Penn’s fight on page 208, or the incredibly brief mention of gender reassignment surgeries in Thailand and the negative, fetishizing culture that plagues the “Kathoey” there (p.288). Then of course there is the problematic matter that it never occurs to Rosie or Penn to ask Poppy her opinions on things directly relating to her truth and story, such as if she might one day like to have a reassignment surgery, or hormone blockers, or what pronouns to use. She may be “only” five or ten or however old (which will continue to happen to her until the day she dies as a female presenting and therefore a socially infantilized individual), and her opinions may change as she ages, but she is still her own autonomous person and should should be respected as such.

In general, I think Frankel had good intentions with this novel and executed a lovely “fairytale” moral about the ambiguity of the experience of life, and I respect her for that, even if I don’t agree with all of her choices within the plot or characterization.