"when things are sad and awful, crying is an appropriate response"

As one of the characters remarks in Goodbye for Now, “When things are sad and awful, crying is an appropriate response.” Turns out laughing is too. Two of Laurie Frankel’s novels will have you doing both.

Although I haven’t see it, apparently there’s a show on Prime that imagines a world in which life goes on in a digital afterlife. A similar premise is at work in Frankel’s Goodbye for Now. After Sam and Meredith are matched in an online dating program that Sam developed, their tenuous relationship is tested by the death of Meredith’s grandmother Livvie. To help Meredith through her grief, Sam develops a program that draws from Livvie’s digital footprint to generate and respond to emails and eventually simulates her video chatting. They develop the idea into a new venture they call RePose and, for a price, offer the service to others who have recently lost a loved one. (spoiler alert) When an unforeseen accident occurs, Sam discovers first-hand the comforts and caveats of his creation.

Although Frankel’s humor and spot-on dialogue are apparent in Goodbye, she kicks it up a notch in her subsequent novel This is How it Always Is (another winning pick of Reese’s book club). Rosie Walsh, a physician, and her husband Penn, a writer, have a house-full of boys. When she gets pregnant with their fifth child (“Are you Catholic?” friends ask), they hope for a girl. Instead, tumbling into their messy lives is Claude. Precocious, he announces at three that he wants to be a chef,  a scientist, an ice cream cone, and a girl. The transition takes some time, but eventually Claude becomes Poppy. 

When the family moves to Seattle, Rosie and Penn introduce their four sons and daughter to their new friends and neighbors. Entangled within the story is Penn’s fairy tale about a prince and a magical suit of armor through which he grapples with the life lessons his family is learning and re-learning about acceptance. Frankel, who draws from her own experience raising a transgender child, portrays in Rosie the tensions of feeling hopeful and anxious that every mother can instantly recognize as her own.