Stories Stories: Laurie Frankel’s Adoption Novel, Family Family, is Neither Sunshine Nor Misery
India Allwood is a fictional character who makes a living playing fictional characters. A theater actress turned TV star, she often draws upon emotions from her time as a pregnant teenager who placed a baby for adoption. India also happens to be an adoptive mother. These experiences inspire her to take a role in a controversial movie about adoption—it’s not very good, but she likes that it has a happy ending—but they don’t prepare her for the blowback from multiple communities. Some dislike that her birth-mother character is a drug addict. Others think the pat ending diminishes adoptees’ pain. When her own history emerges, it unleashes a chaotic family reunion of sorts, as well as a media storm. (The pro-life community wants to anoint her as an icon, despite the fact that she is emphatically pro-choice.)
In her fifth book, Family Family (published last month by Henry Holt & Co.), author and adoptive mother Laurie Frankel does not conceal her own attempt to tell a positive adoption story. The idea of a lighthearted adoption story intrigued me. Was such a thing possible without dismissing the inherently hard parts of adoption?
In Frankel’s confident hands, it is. As any parent who has sobbed through their baby’s first day of preschool knows, it is possible to contain multiple huge emotions at once. Sometimes, especially in advocacy communities, especially on the internet, people forget this. Frankel is a master of conveying emotional complexity in witty, economical prose.
My spouse and I attended our first info session as hopeful adoptive parents back in 2011, adopted our oldest son in 2015, and our second in 2022. In that decade, I witnessed the landscape change—personally and according to the many, many, many adoption professionals we encountered. Early on, we encountered more expectant mothers like India. College students. High school students whose moms were helping them make a plan. Our oldest son’s mom was not an actress bound for stardom, but she was a young professional who simply—or rather, complicatedly—was not ready to be a single mother.
Our second adoption process coincided with a global pandemic and a meth and opioid crisis that had been percolating for years. We encountered more addicts, more unhoused mothers, more stories that would be impossible to tell with a lighthearted twist.
I carried all these stories as I read. Every novel, like every adoption match and every parent-child relationship, is particular and insular. It is its own world, with its own rules and agreements. Simultaneously, it takes place in a larger world, one fraught with systemic inequities. The borders of both are porous.
I emailed Frankel a few of the questions I bring as a reader, writer, and adoptive parent. She spoke with MUTHA about attempting the impossible, writing and parenting during COVID, and cutting 300,000 words.
Cheryl Klein: Family Family isn’t just about “the positive side of adoption” (we have adoption agency ads for that). Rather, it’s a madcap comedy about what happens when someone’s past life catches up with her and is no longer just her own, if it ever was. While reading, I often thought “in the hands of a lesser writer, this could go very wrong,” but you have a way with emotional language that is economical, witty, and heartfelt without being maudlin. When and how did you know you were ready—as both a writer and an adoptive parent—to tell this story?
Laurie Frankel: First of all, thank you for your kind words. Secondly, what a great question. The honest answer is I’m not sure I did know. Going into this book, I knew I wanted to talk about adoption, and I knew it would be neither sugar-coated nor maudlin, but that’s about all I knew. That’s not unusual for me, but it means, truthfully, I probably wasn’t ready when I started. I think I generally become ready along the way, through both intense revision (I cut 300,000 words that weren’t working from this book) and, in this case, intense parenting (I drafted this book during COVID, so my kid was home from school for a year and a half).
India is almost immediately overwhelmed and frustrated by pressure to represent all things to all communities. In that way, there’s a meta element to the book. How did you approach the challenges and arguably impossible demands of representation?
Ha! Yes! Very meta. Thank you for noticing. From the seed of this idea, I was worried about a) getting it right and b) honoring all the many people on all the many sides of adoptive families while c) not pissing anybody off. First of all, not pissing anybody off probably isn’t the right goal when endeavoring to write a novel or make good art, and second of all, it’s probably not possible.
So that struggle became part of the book itself. Practically speaking, this novel has multiple very close third-person narrators so that we see their points of view as intimately as possible while never forgetting that they’re extremely personal and not intended to be universal. It has widely varied characters with a range of perspectives and experiences. It doesn’t tell one adoption story but many. It doesn’t answer questions but poses them. It doesn’t aim to iron out the complexities but, if anything, wrinkle them further. And then there were those 300,000 words that got cut. My approach here—as always, but especially because of those impossible demands you mention—was lots and lots and lots of editing to make sure I was doing justice to these challenges which are, after all, the stuff of novels.
If it’s simple, you can say it in a social media post; it’s because it’s so hard that it has to be a novel. That’s what novels do.
Did you share early drafts with any adoptee readers? What kind of feedback did they have?
As you can probably guess from my answers above, my early drafts—like the first couple hundred or so—are too messy for anyone to read but me. And in fact, I have very few early readers at all. But eventually, this book started making its way in the world including into the hands of adoptees, often without my realizing they were adoptees because of course that’s not something we necessarily know about people, as well as readers who were birth parents or adoptive parents or otherwise something other than blood-related to everyone they consider family. I have been so grateful to early readers who told me they felt seen or who themselves expressed gratitude for an adoption story that isn’t all misery and trauma nor all sunshine and puppy dogs but rather as full of joy and complication and heartbreak as any other kind of family.
With her omnipresent index cards, India is a compulsive planner who sometimes willingly enters situations that blow up her plans. One of the novel’s themes seems to be “children are autonomous humans who will blow up your plans.” How did you develop her character and the various parent-child relationships in the book?
Children are autonomous humans who will blow up your plans, no question. There’s no arguing that, no matter how your family came to be. You know those desert island stories where you strand a mixed bunch of people somewhere remote and confined and then see what happens? Or murder mysteries where a varied group is trapped in a remote cabin then starts getting picked off one by one? Family is a lot like that. No matter how they came to be related, family members are often very different from one another with often very different needs. And yet they’re stuck together, for better and for worse, so I think those dynamics are always interesting to explore.
I also think it requires ten hours of the reader’s time and 380-some pages to do it justice. I wasn’t after pat relationships or shallow complications or quick fixes or platitudes. I wanted to explore these relationships and the challenges of these relationships as deeply as I could. We like to pretend love is simple or love is enough or love supersedes strife or love unites, and it isn’t and it doesn’t. It’s harder than that, which is a good thing, not a bad thing, but which definitely meant letting those relationships develop and tangle and remain uncomfortable. At that point, it feels like the characters develop themselves, and all you have to do is get out of their way and let them get on with it.
Among many positive reviews on Goodreads, I also saw one that said “Adoptive parents should not be writing books on the adoption experience.” Personally, I don’t agree with any categorical “[Blank] shouldn’t write [blank]”; statements, but I do wonder: What can publishers, editors, writers, readers, and those in the adoption community do to make sure we hear more from adoptees, both children and adults?
Me neither, I don’t believe in [blank] shouldn’t write [blank] directives, but even if I did, adoptive parents are intimately involved in the “adoption experience,” so if we’re talking about adoption—and we should be—we should be aiming to hear from everyone. We need more stories from adopted people. We need more stories from birth mothers. We need more stories from adoptive parents and siblings and extended families. In short, we need more stories, as wide and varied and ranging as possible. We need to stop pretending families where everyone isn’t blood-related are rare, never mind always settled for or less than.
Among other things, we should probably disabuse ourselves of the notion that there’s one or even a few adoptee experiences that stand in for all adoptee experiences, or that being adopted is any less varied or more static an experience than any other way of being a member of a family. I have been so grateful for stories and perspectives and experiences readers have shared with me about being adopted, about placing children for adoption, about adopting, about any number of other nontraditional ways they became related to the people they’re related to.
For anyone who’s willing and interested, there’s a form on my website (https://bit.ly/4aUPIK5) where people can share their stories and experiences or even just their feelings and ideas. But I also think publishers and editors are hungry for stories by adopted writers and by birth parents, and the more of them that hit the shelves, the better the world gets for everyone in it.
How do you balance parenting and writing?
My first response to this question was laughter. Which is better than tears, but maybe only just. I am extraordinarily lucky that after my second book I was able to make writing my day job, which gives me more hours to do it while my kid is at school. And she’s older now which has shifted the writing-parenting balance somewhat. I wouldn’t say it’s simpler but it’s different, and some aspects of it are certainly easier.
I used to figure out the next scene while sitting at the playground watching her on the monkey bars. Now I figure out the next scene while waiting out high school football games to get to her part with the marching band. I used to write in the car if she fell asleep on the way home. Now I write in the car between carpool drop-off and pick-up. I refer you to your earlier observation that children will blow up your plans. This is true even as they turn from toddlers to teenagers. My daughter trained me, though, to navigate this fact from when she was a tiny baby. Everyone said to nap when the baby napped, but instead I wrote when the baby napped and thereby learned to write with divided attention and limited time. She taught me to use those monkey-bar hours to get ready so that during that (brief) nap time I could write, and she taught me to get the story down badly so I’d be ready to fix it later when I had more time. And all of that has served me well as she’s grown and stopped monkey-barring and napping and being a tiny baby.
About the Author
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