This is How It Always Is - Reliable Narration and How We Experience Characters

Reliable narration is something I consistently grapple with. My initial instinct is to trust the narrator - why should the narrator lie or omit or misdirect me? Shouldn’t I be trusting of them like I trusted my parents when I was small? But in fiction, the narrator isn’t beholden to me, they’re beholden to the story. There were several points while I read that I had to stop and ask, “is this character supposed to be someone we should genuinely trust?” and “why isn’t more information being given to us about this/why is only one side of the story being told?” It made me think to last semester in my Craft of the YA Novel class when we read and discussed Parrotfish. We discussed whether a child who is transgender or questioning their gender should take the narrative as an example of coming out that shows acceptance. Should there also be some kind of section where it explains that the sixteen-year-old main character, Grady, was able to be mostly accepted and experience some ease in transitioning because he was surrounded by so many people who already accepted him for who he was? That unfortunately not all environments are safe to be out en masse because of the hate that exists in the world. But we saw this hate in Frankel’s novel, and we felt the fear that Rosie and Penn felt for their daughter.

No work that deals with the grey areas of gender will be perfect, I don’t think. No work could capture all the nuances and every experience that gender-nonconforming individuals experience. While This Is How It Always Is captures the uncertainty that parenting is and while it does give some insight into the questions that burn when it comes to those individuals who live in the grey area of gender who are also minors (Is it up to the parents whether they transition all the way? At what point is the child old enough to decide if and how much they want to transition? Do the benefits of hormone-blockers outweigh the potential risks of wayleighing puberty?), I worry that some parents may see this novel as the best way to approach having a child who is gender-nonconforming.

My first concern with this is the character of Mr. Tongo. While he’s supposed to have several degrees and Rosie and Penn treat him as a counselor or psychologist, the language in which he speaks about Poppy and her transition is concerning as the tone the language creates makes him into some kind of cheesy, informational video they might show in school. This came up first when he appeared on the skype chat as godzilla posing as puberty (180) and coupled with his continual chorus of “this is going to be fun!” (181) which, in my reading, made the way he approached the subject similar to how you might discuss something with a small child while also not acknowledging they are intelligent human beings. As a reader even, it felt patronizing and not educational or helpful. Mr. Tongo and how much both Rosie and Penn viewed him as an expert with the answers when they felt lost troubled me when Poppy was outed. His remarks that “she hasn’t suffered enough” and that, as parents, they had “protected her too thoroughly” (231) left me feeling angry above anything else. It would have been one thing had he said something like, “great! You’ve created an environment for her where she can be herself so she knows that she’s loved and accepted and what that looks like! Now she’ll know what it’s like to be loved and accepted and that those who love and accept you are safe to come to with your truths and concerns and fears,” but there was none of that. Only, “that doesn’t help Poppy live anywhere but your house” (231). While it’s true that she’s ten and is at the age where kids really start to learn about how mean other people can be, I had great difficulty finding the places where he helped them find a balance between being supportive and putting their child’s happiness above all else as parents do and being honest with Poppy about what people are like but that it’s okay because she will always have the people who love her best.

These are the concerns and questions that came up for me, and I became concerned because, if a reader chose to read the novel and trust the narrator, to not question if the narrator is reliable, would they think that this is the way to do things? Or would they see that a large part of the novel is about how these two parents did what they thought was best at the time as parents do for their children no matter how those children identify?