Information and Conversation: This is How it Always is

    Laurie Frankel’s novel This is How it Always is comes filled with information about the struggles of gender dysphoria as well as with homophobia, transphobia, and what it feels like to be outed. One very essential part of telling this story was educating the reader on these topics in a way that added to the narrative rather than took away from it. A useful way of doing this is through conversation, which we see at several points in the novel. Most of these conversations take place between Rosie and Penn, such as when they are discussing vaginoplasty (pg 233), or when Penn and Rosie are talking to Marginny and Frank about Poppy’s gender dysphoria (pg 159). One thing this does is put the responsibility of knowledge off the reader. There is not a narrator holding the readers hand explaining through lengthy internal monologue what vaginoplasty and gender dysphoria are, why they are so complicated, and where their place is in this story. For me, it made me feel relieved that these topics were not being explained to me as a reader, but around me in the scene that the author was setting. While I felt like I knew a basic amount of information about these topics, I still felt overwhelmed by them. However, by showing other characters struggling to understand these concepts and the intricacies that they carry with them, the author was able to create a sense of comfort in the act of not knowing.

    While nobody was holding my hand to walk me through this information, I was still able to learn what the author needed me to learn in those scenes. It illustrated that there is nothing wrong with not having knowledge already. In many ways it showed that not having this knowledge already available was beneficial for characters. Take Mr. Tongo for example. Rosie and Penn were at a loss when they turned to Mr. Tongo, because they lacked this knowledge they were able to reach out to a resource that would end up providing them with more support than they would have had access to had they already known how to support Poppy. In lacking knowledge, searching for this knowledge, and utilizing this knowledge as necessary the characters Rosie and Penn are able to make this knowledge accessible to the reader as well. Their knowledge parallels the knowledge of the reader, and together they sift through the complicated information they are receiving and process it together.

    Rosie and Penn internalize this information they receive through conversations with Mr. Tongo and are able to then process it and share it with others like Marginny and Frank. This makes the knowledge ruminate in the reader's mind much in the same way it is ruminating in Rosie and Penn’s minds. These complex ideas then become more palatable the more the author works through them in the conversations of the characters. I thought this was a very smart way to convey complex information to the reader in large quantities without making it seem like the author was lecturing us. For that, I am both impressed and grateful.