This, Rosie reflected, even at the time, was true.” (P. Usually boys don’t wear dresses to preschool,’ Rosie admitted carefully. “‘Is that why you want to wear a dress? Because all your friends wear dresses?’ In her intensely thoughtful and emotionally resonant book, This Is How It Always Is, Laurie Frankel examines what happens to one family when the world as they know it is upended by one simple action by the youngest of their five sons.Ĭlaude has always been delightfully, prodigiously idiosyncratic and very much possessed of his own unique sense of who he is, and so when he declares he wants to wear a dress to school, it is not seen as anything more than a poorly-timed (in the middle of the frantic rush to get ready for school) expression of his much-loved eccentricity. It was a comforting way to live, with every decision a seemingly easy one predicated purely on whether something good would be upheld and something bad would be struck down.Īnd yet as I grew older and began to question the inconsistencies between what I had been told and how the world actually is – if you choose, as so many don’t, to loo up and over the impenetrable wall of rigid belief and consider whether something else might be at work in the world beyond narrow, legalistic dogma – it became clear to me that we live in a world of complex, nuanced and diverse greys that require thoughtful consideration to navigate and which don’t always present as clear and easy answers.

Growing up as the son of a Baptist minister in a family heavily involved in the church, the world was presented as a starkly illuminated contrast of black and white, a demarcation between Christian morality which was, naturally enough, presented as good, and worldly values which were quite obviously and unarguably bad. (cover image courtesy Hachette Australia)

This is how it always is cover