I can't decide whether or not I like This Is How It Always Is. I sort of trust the narrator, but my trust is limited. Let me explain: I don't really trust cis folks to tell trans stories. The trouble is that you are just bad at it. Even when the writing is lovely (in Trumpet, for example), all the research in the world isn't going to make up for lived experience.
Luckily, I guess, this isn't so much a trans story as the story of the parents of a trans child. And honestly that annoys me, too. I'm getting the same vibes here that I get off so many parents of disabled children: they are making it all about themselves. And I guess as more and more kids come out as trans, the "disability mom" phenomenon is going to spread so we'll have a "trans mom" phenomenon. And meanwhile we'll have whole populations of kids who are perfectly capable of talking about their own lives but who aren't being listened to. But their parents are being listened to! And I guess that matters more?
While it was nice to see trans representation, and I enjoyed the book in a lot of ways, I was also very frustrated by it. The Jane Doe scene seemed like trauma porn--it was entirely possible for Rosie to reach the same conclusions about needing to protect Poppy and to treat the trans woman in her emergency room without her imagining this horrible assault on and murder of a trans woman. She didn't even get a name. That scene really bothered me.
The book also seemed to have a misunderstanding of transness and how it works. I understand that Frankel referred to Poppy as Claude in the beginning because she hadn't come out yet, but having the parents misgender her afterwards and calling her Poppy-Claude later was not good. And having the parents out Poppy to the neighbors then feel guilty for not outing her to the whole school (when, as was made clear earlier in the book, people are literally killed for being trans, and coming out is a very personal decision) seems really questionable. I'm actually a bit uncomfortable with Frankel outing her own child in the Author's Note.
This post makes me want to do jazz hands for emphasis as I do a chorus number behind you. I agree with every point you have here, and you conveyed them so much more eloquently that I could have after initially finishing This is How it Always is. The self-centeredness of the parents, especially the mother, really struck me, as it was annoying in that it both was cruel, and realistic. There were so many moments where Poppy could have been allowed to drive her own narrative, both in terms of the plot, and the narration, but the parents chose to infantilize her. Which happens all too much to children, the differently abled, the mentally ill, Queer people, and women. All categories that Poppy in some form or another seems to fall into, with the arguable exception being physical ability. Further, I think the term "--- porn" really is perfect for this novel, as it relies on both trauma porn and sympathy porn, which White, cis people seem to love (just look at Hallmark).
ReplyDeleteYour blog post brings up a big topic I've been struggling with. Authorial intent vs actual impact. I still have mixed feelings about this novel. I didn't hate it, but I don't know if I liked it simply because its very...it feels a bit like a an undergrad social science major grappling through a text on queer theory and gender construction, if that makes sense? Like someone took Judith Butler and went 'I completely get it!' And I think the more the piece tries to acknowledge that its not a concrete imaging and that everything isn't either/or (it uses the narrator to do this) the more it feels forced or contrived (HA, this is the world I was look for when I was writing my blogpost). I wonder what story Frankel was trying to tell.
ReplyDeleteHilary lots of good points here: I was also unsettled by the exploitive-feeling scene detailing Jane Doe's death. Rosie knows she can't outrun the dangers of Poppy's life, yet she runs to the coast and continues to fear all the possibilities that could play out. Frankel makes the parents as as understanding as any, yet they still can't dictate her destiny, as nobody should for anyone else.
ReplyDeleteLots of good points. I go back to my constant chant. We need all the stories. And the parents are always winning, sometimes they are winning in the stories written by the children and that’s something to explore. (I’m reading lots of workshops stories like that too.) i am interested in the dialogue of how an author could include poppy as a narrator, not having been in poppy’s body/mind/spirit. And we have to, and i do believe this is also craft, take into consideration the marketing that literature does re: the underrepresented. :(
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