What is Wrong with Politicizing This Is How It Always Is

Last week, we discussed the layered history within Forget Sorrow by Belle Yang using language such as “nesting doll” and “history within a history within a history.” These ancestral tales were funnelled through many voices, including her father’s, to ultimately reach Yang. The “truth” of whose voice we were hearing weighed on my mind, and troubled me at times. Was it Yang shaping the character, or was it her father?

Well… while Frankel’s story-within-a-story technique with Grunwauld is another narrative-shaping force, I was not concerned with the “truth” of narration because this is fiction. It begins and ends there for me. This leads me to the core of my frustration with both the narrative and the political environment that underpins the novel, and which I believe the novel serves to entertain.

I can only imagine that Frankel is constantly barraged with questions about her own child and how much overlap there is. (Of course, that is going to be what most readers are concerned about. Hell, I thought about it while I read because parts of this felt straight out of my own life, the bathtime/bedtime routine, the specific and nuanced details of those scenes.)

“How much of this is based on your real experience, or your child’s experience?” pretends to be curious, but it is concerned with ethics of telling “other people’s stories,” [read: this is not your story to tell unless you have experience, so I’ve gotta catch you, you big old fraud] while it actually undermines the author’s creative license.

Why so much concern? Is it because the content of this book within our political environment means this book is a parenting manual of trans children? Is it so that cis readership can imagine the nearly-perfect upbringing? Ok, yes, there are struggles that are very real and scary, like the dumb man pulling out a gun during a playdate, but Poppy is born into a nearly perfect family. That’s the fuel of the book -- the niceness of this family. Readers can feel good about themselves as they sympathize with Rosie and Penn. America can be alright and eat their “I’m so tolerant” cake, too.

“How much of this is based on your real experience, or your child’s experience” is an interrogation of the story’s authenticity. A reader who asks this has already figured out how to digest a piece of the community and force it to represent the whole. They are really just asking because they are still wrestling with something and trying to legitimize what they've read.

“How much of this is based on your real experience, or your child’s experience” is the wrong question. If the reader feels like the story is unbelievable or un-credible, a more appropriate question should be about how much research went into x,y and z. For example, I want to ask Frankel about Part III when Rosie and Claude/Poppy volunteer at a clinic in Thailand. What research did Frankel do for this portion of the book?

Taking a sharp left turn to talk about craft for a second, one of the scenes I wanted address was on page 108, with Jane Doe. It was the only instance of Rosie diving into her imagination… so why now? Penn is the author of the family, and he weaves stories all the time. They are allowed to be stories. What troubles me is that this scene is presented with absolute assertion on Rosie’s part that she knows she’s right: “But Rosie saw it right away, not only why this patient-with-a-penis had been taken to be female but also what had happened to her, why she was here.” Um, how? How does Rosie know this for sure? This imagining is presented as fact. Yes, Rosie is shaken by the violence of someone who reminds her of Poppy -- this could be Frankel making a choice to make Rosie’s character less likable, less trustworthy -- but I don’t get the sense that this was Frankel’s intent. Rosie has hiccups as a character but for the most part, she's solid. To me, the politics underpinning this novel are screaming at this point. People will read this like an episode of Law and Order SVU. They already see the vulnerability of trans women plastered all over the media, so why do it here?

I veered away from craft. I started to mention Penn’s storytelling and how Grunwauld functions in the novel, and here’s what I think: these fairytales hold the reader to a kind of innocence and internal world. They are spoken through Penn’s voice, to his children, and we as readers get to be the kids in the world of fairytale for these moments.