Laurie Frankel

This Is How It Always Is follows a family with five sons, the youngest of whom is happier as a daughter, and the parents' decision to move across the country and let the new name stand without explanation. Frankel drew on her own household; she has a transgender daughter and has written about the difference between telling a story that is yours and telling one that belongs to your child. The novel is warm and comic in a way the subject is not usually allowed to be, and its argument is that a family secret protects the people keeping it rather more than the person it is about. She writes from Seattle.