Club News and Activities

Gulf Harbour Book Club Review

  • February 2025
  • BY JOAN KAPLAN

FAMILY, FAMILY

The Gulf Harbour Book Club met on January 6 with Author Laurie Frankel to discuss her latest book, Family, Family. This is the third time Laurie has joined us.  She is delightful as ever!  There were 31 in attendance. 

I did the author review.  I found a very funny review online.  Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of five novels. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Publisher’s Weekly, People Magazine, Lit Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Washington State Book Award and the Endeavor Award. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and been optioned for film and TV. A former college professor, she now writes full-time in Seattle, Washington where she lives with her family and makes good soup. We have already read This Is How It Always Is; One Two Three and now Family, Family.

FAQ

Q: Where can I learn more about this soup?

A: I often post pics of soups I’m making on Instagram.

Q: Wow! You must be excellent at social media.

​A: I am pretty lousy at social media. Everything I want to say is book-length.

Q: Then how do I get in touch?

A: I’d love to hear from you! I try on the socials, but you should probably just email me instead.

Q: What about Tiktok?

A: I am almost 50. I can’t with Tiktok. I’m really sorry.

I found this review by Jenny Bartoy, Special to The Seattle Times.  It captures the essence of the book.

The novel opens when talented Hollywood actor India Allwood is thrust into a media storm. She said the wrong thing while promoting her latest movie — the truth. In her opinion, the film does an inadequate job of representing the nuanced reality of adoption. India is an adoptive mother and believes adoption means more than just trauma and tragedy. Her candor unleashes a PR nightmare and spurs her precocious twins into action in an attempt to save their mother’s reputation. Their solution: Call on family to help. They track down the child whom India placed for adoption as a teenager in her hometown of Seattle. From there, everything unravels.

Most of the things Frankel writes about are “things that I am ranting to myself about in the shower or when I walk the dog.” In the case of “Family Family,” Frankel was stirred by the relentless negative messaging surrounding adoption.

“Adoption is always offered as this last-resort, second-best thing that you have settled for,” she said. An adoptive mother herself, she found this framework reductive and harmful, “because there are lots of ways to make good families and lots of ways to make crappy ones,” and they are not necessarily dictated by blood and genetics. As she points out, most people experience strife with biological relatives, even in healthy families, while others opt for estrangement.

In part, perceptions of adoption have fostered these negative assumptions. “Parents used to keep adoption secret from their children,” Frankel said, because it was understood to be shameful “for all three legs of the stool: the child, the birth parent and the adoptive parents.” For Frankel, adoption is not only far from shameful, it is neither negative nor sad. While trauma can factor into adoption, love does more so.

When it comes to family, Frankel believes normalcy is multifaceted, a notion she’s explored throughout her five novels. While her books are all different, “the through thread is this idea that a wider definition of normal makes the world a better place for everyone,” she said. “These things about ourselves that we think are weird and outlying and aberrant, maybe embarrassing or shameful, are in fact this way for everybody.” Frankel believes the more we talk about wider ranges of normal and acknowledge the many ways to make a family, the more we’ll see shame and negativity disappear.

She explores this premise in “Family Family,” an engaging romp written with her trademark heart and humor. The story is told in a dual timeline: the present in which the media debacle unfolds, and the past, from India’s adolescence to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Frankel began writing this novel in 2020, a week before lockdown, an experience she found unsettling in particular for its impact on writing fiction. “Where do characters meet if not in coffee shops, if not at schools, if they don’t run into each other at the grocery store?” she said. Writing a novel is a forward-looking exercise, made intangible by the early pandemic. “[Writing] imagines that there will be people in three years, and I had no confidence in the future.” After much rewriting and deleting 300,000 words — a loss unfathomable to most writers — Frankel found her story.

In “Family Family,” Frankel’s fans will enjoy meeting another cast of warm and witty characters. Protagonist India is a single mother, ambitious and successful in her chosen field. In many stories, such a character’s downfall might stem from their hubris or selfishness, but India is well-rounded and lovable. Her problems arise instead from the (fictional) reality of her lived experience.

“Female characters are often punished for being driven and successful,” Frankel explained, “and I didn’t want her career to be this dream deferred that she can never get to. I knew she would have to sacrifice a lot of things for motherhood, but I wanted it to be lifelike sacrifice, not narrative punishment.”

Frankel’s characters are driven by the desire to make things right, to talk things through. This lends an uplifting spirit to her novel. “As a human and also narratively, I am interested in people who learn something from their mistakes and who are leading with full heart,” the author said. The book’s cast includes India’s endearing and wildly different 10-year-old twins, along with a diverse bunch of characters, each with their own challenges and opinions.

The narrative point of view is fluid throughout the novel, with most primary characters, including children, providing some insight. According to Frankel, this multiplicity of intimate viewpoints allows for nuance. “It seemed important that everybody get their say.” She worries that complicated issues get oversimplified in our social media era. “Often we’re tamping it down: This is always bad or this is always good, and you must express it in 200 characters. But [adoption] is really complicated with lots of arguments on all sides.” The author hopes 400 pages is a better way to address the topic, giving positive representation to fresh perspectives on adoption.

The Gulf Harbour Book Club meets on the first Monday of each month in the Club’s Boardroom.  If you want to join the Book Club email [email protected].  Zoom is available for Members if the author allows it.    We have the following authors on Zoom February Becoming Madam Secretary, March is Caveat Emptor by Ken Perenyi with Sandi Altner, The Stolen Queen, and The End of Your Life Book Club.  The famous authors are Stephanie Dray, Sandi Altner, Fiona Davis, and Will Schwalbe.