August 2025 Book Club: This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Our August 2025 book is This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel (fiction, 327 pages). It was a big hit when it was published in in 2017 so hopefully the library still has more than enough copies for us to share.

"Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be."

This is how a family keeps a secret…and how that secret ends up keeping them.

This is how a family lives happily ever after…until happily ever after becomes complicated.

This is how children change…and then change the world.

This is Claude. He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess.

When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl.
Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes.

Laurie Frankel's This Is How It Always Is is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. And it’s about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.

Social half-hour starts at 6:30 and the book discussion starts around 7:00. We will be inside in the usual room - the tasting room. It's inside, past the bar, up the stairs, left through the door, and past the restrooms. Ask at the bar for directions. Second Line should have a food truck/ vendor out there or you can bring your own.