EVENT TRANSCRIPT
Laurie Frankel/Emily Ranson
The Ivy Bookshop
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Emily Rosen: Hi everyone--thanks so much for being here tonight. We'll let everyone get settled and start in a few moments.
Thank you for being here. I am Emily Rosen and am the outreach manager for the Ivy Bookshop. We're excited to have Laurie Frankel here to talk about her new book One Two Three. It has been passed around among the staff members. It's about a fight for justice across generations in a small town. Bourne is a small town and the first moving truck arrived after years and it's about the Mitchell sisters. I loved this book and I had just watched Erin Brockovich for the first time. This was a good companion piece.
Laurie Frankel is an award-winning author of several books including This is How it Always Is. She lives in Seattle with her husband and border collie and makes good soup. She is joined by Emily Ranson. At Clean Water she works for advocacy and their mission is to protect our environment and quality of life. They work to solve environmental community problems.
You can post questions in the chat for Emily and Laurie and hopefully we'll have some good conversation. I will turn it over to them now. Thank you so much.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you for doing this; I appreciate it. I brought this mug and have had coffee out of it every morning. I'm happy to be in Baltimore. Thank you Susan for doing captioning. Emily and I will have a conversation and it will be different from most book events.
One of the funny things about the book is that it has different themes and directions. I have lots of questions and put yours in the chat.
Emily Ranson: I read the book and it was really interesting to see how clean water policy and legislation and lawsuits all tie together in this package narrated by three teenage girls. One Two Three is about redefining the assumptions we make. How did this perspective come to be a major part of the story?
Laurie Frankel: All of those elements are strange out of the mouths of teenagers. They were a pain in the ass. They are children and don't know what they're talking about. They're in a small town with a dark past. They have been harmed by the river that runs through their town and their groundwater. They are very naïve about the politics and science. They grew up drinking up the water and their mother is in a class action lawsuit against the polluters. You need characters who know everything and often nothing.
Emily Ranson: It sounds like the daughters are having a different experience than what you've had.
Laurie Frankel: I spent most of my childhood in Maryland and I spent most of my time in the creek and clean water was very important. I visit regularly and my kids spend time in the creek. We all lived downstream. That's the answer to that question. I didn't grow up in a small town and wasn't wronged like the people in this town. They have a variety of challenges. I wasn't exposed to water like that.
It takes picking up a newspaper every day to read about towns like this. The town in the book is not locatable; you can't tell where it is. It could be anywhere. It is sobering that we all live downstream. It's not a problem happening somewhere else. You can't have that attitude. Problems that seem to be elsewhere are coming to you. Your water may have this problem. We've learned the value of community this year; help one another. In writing about someone else, I hope I've written about everybody.
Emily Ranson: I grew up in Howard County as well and neighborhood creeks got me interested in clean water advocacy. Throughout most places, we assume if the water is clear, it's clean. They town sounded an alarm that there was a smell but it turned green they got the attention of the government and the news. Just because water is clear doesn't mean it's clean. With all the thunderstorms, we have sewage runoff into the water. You shouldn't be touching natural waterways until 24 hours after a rainstorm. It's very common and people don't think about it. I know some kids who got sick after playing in their backyard when the creek overflowed. They had no idea.
Laurie Frankel: Emily, you're killing me; we were outside in the creek. It's a visual thing and it may smell or taste funny. It doesn't help you if you're in it.
Emily Ranson: That's always my public service announcement. Everything comes back to waste; it's a major issue and is near and dear to our waterways in Maryland. It sounded like talking about the chemical that it was PFAS.
Laurie Frankel: I read an article about a town in West Virginia downstream from a chemical plant that had PFAS. It takes a long time to exact justice for that level of horror. I read the article and ruminated about what became the theme of this book. I read about chemicals in the paper all over the country.
Emily Ranson: If you aren't familiar with PFAS, you start to see it more and more in articles. It's the Teflon pan, the coating in your hiking boots, it's in pesticides. A couple of organizations in Maryland just did some testing of mosquito sprays and there is PFAS present in those as well. It's a forever chemical. It can't be disposed of. It spreads further when you burn it. A lot of early testing came from North Carolina where a DuPont plant manufactured it and it polluted drinking water. It's a forever chemical. We don't have to know how to dispose of something before we use it.
Laurie Frankel: I had to pack it in fiction because the new stories are so anger inducing. I feel so powerless; I need to have water. Chemicals are not usually listed on products so there's no avoiding them. You might go to the company and ask them to stop using it. The answer is that they know it's terrible but they won't stop using it and you can't stop using water. This is the point of our living downstream; you can't get away from it and you are powerless. My response is wrap it in fiction. Look at the teenage characters and you feel for them. It boils down to bad and heartbreaking news. I'm so uplifting today.
Emily Ranson: Many companies have announced that they are not using it anymore especially on food packaging. Many outdoor companies use it to make coats water resistant and they are stopping using it. Maybe a rain jacket just can't be waterproofed without these chemicals. With wool you can be warm and wet.
Laurie Frankel: I have been reading that they are replacing these chemicals with things that aren't an improvement.
Emily Ranson: That is the tricky thing with PFAS; it's thousands of chemicals, not just one. Alternatives are chemicals in the same class. It's expensive to do the health studies on 1000+ chemicals.
Laurie Frankel: It's difficult to do the studies as well. The book is about the articles report on the spills and leakages and have long-term health consequences. You have to look long term and it hasn't happened with some of the chemicals. You have to go back later and look. I went into that with the book; what does it look like in 20 years? It's a difficult thing to pinpoint. The goal is to avoid blame.
Emily Ranson: It's a wide variety of cancers and neurological impacts. How often do we see that like with Roundup? How do you prove it was a chemical exposure? It's difficult to make the direct connection. No wonder the lawsuits and characters were stuck in a lawsuit for so long.
Laurie Frankel: Some of it isn't in good faith; cause and effect are difficult to pinpoint. Who's to say what caused the injuries you suffered? When you bring in the issue on top of it with other chemicals, it's complicated.
Emily Ranson: I want to talk about the characters. You described it as a super hero story. The daughters will save you.
Laurie Frankel: We have no shortage of super hero stories. They are everywhere. They are often the same story over and over. They tend to be male, a super hero working on his own. He triumphs because he's fast and strong and leaves great swaths of destruction. Girl super heroes are different. One of the heroes comments that girls don't get a lot of credit for their strength. They gossip about what goes on in their town and it's silly and frivolous, but in fact it's a strength. They work together and save the world. They don't have the super speed and strength so work around them. They can't climb a building or lift cars. It gets written off. The strengths people have can make a difference. I wanted to look at how 3 teenage girls who had been wronged figured out a way to get justice.
Emily Ranson: In the book they bring up SAT vocabulary words. As a writer, how did you maintain this balance of words?
Laurie Frankel: You probably know what that word is but they may not use them right because they're kids. They're getting rid of the SATs. It was set in 2018 and now they don't have to learn vocabulary for the SATs. At the beginning the girls all sounded like me. I'm not a genius but am smarter than I was at 16. Their vocabulary might be more impressive than it normally would be. One of them is super smart. I looked up some of those words too when I needed a big word.
Emily Ranson: You said this novel was about the gap between the rich and poor; it's about the have-nots. You wrote it pre-Covid 19. Have your thoughts evolved?
Laurie Frankel: You hate to hit it with the global pandemic. I've been thinking about what happens when the book is written for a world that doesn't exist anymore. Until this year, we knew maybe how connected we all are but didn't think about it that much. Some communities have gotten the short end of a lot of sticks. I'm blessed to not have grown up there. This year we have learned that there is no "over there;" it's "over here." Water flows and it isn't up to me. The lines we draw and stories with tell aren't really true. We have seen remarkable support of one another this year and wide, broad communities. We've seen a lot of banding together around the world. This is also in this book. This is not something that you want to predict; it's been a difficult year.
Emily Ranson: The townspeople hope that economic develop will bring a hospital; there are few healthcare options.
Laurie Frankel: People think that if they got jobs and healthcare, maybe they would get a hospital. Baltimore and Seattle are big cities but it's happening close by, not far away.
Emily Ranson: Think about the inequities of the vaccine rollout.
Laurie Frankel: What if you don't have transportation? We build housing that's not near infrastructure. People need to get to the things they need.
Emily Ranson: In the book, one thing that gets brought up is that there is no bus because there's no place for a bus to go. That's an optimistic viewpoint of why they don't have transportation in Bourne. One character mentions how accessible Bourne is for people in wheelchairs. They don't have sidewalks. Was Bourne a sweet spot of a small town?
Laurie Frankel: It's at both ends of the spectrum and a utopic place to live. It's the idea of universal design. Bourne works for everyone in it. Everything works for everyone. They are not normal and are in a small contained space. Both of these things are true at the same time.
Emily Ranson: The first question in the chat: How does economic status and class affect who is exposed and how problems are handled?
Laurie Frankel: When I started reading these articles and looking into the issue, it seemed that maybe these factories and plants and farms and companies happened to be where land was cheap or there was a lot of land. But no, of course not. It's systemic injustice and environmental injustice. The plants are where they are because those are the people who don't have the political power to object hard enough to do anything about it. That is not accidental. It's systemic injustice. You live in a beautiful house and your water probably has the chemicals in it, but they're linked indirectly.
Emily Ranson: One way I find powerful is one of the strongest predictors of health is your ZIP code. They tend to be low-income ZIP codes and people of color. They don't go into wealthy neighborhoods. Think about large chicken houses on the Eastern Shore. People sometimes purchase the property to prevent a big chicken house in their neighborhood. People without the capital get surrounded by the polluting industry.
Laurie Frankel: It is the plan to put the chickens and runoff in places where people can't afford to object to it. It's a staggering injustice.
Emily Ranson: In the book, on this thread of how corporations and moneyed interests get what they want. If you don't have the capital to protect, you're more likely to get pollution. The attorney has a pessimistic view of legislation.
Laurie Frankel: There's a team in giant corporations and they impact legislation. You need to afford a nice house and a lobbying group and they probably don't have that. It's not set up to serve the individual.
Emily Ranson: It's a good plug for campaign finance reform. We have it increasingly happening in Maryland. Candidates can opt into a matching program. They can't take money from corporations. To qualify, they have to have a minimum number of donors from their district. Grassroots candidates are more viable.
Laurie Frankel: Is it working in Maryland?
Emily Ranson: One county used the program and they got elected. Baltimore City is pursuing something similar. There was a ballot question.
Laurie Frankel: That's really good.
Emily Ranson: It's about trying to empower the people. Having a robust advocacy community is a huge help. In Maryland there are groups that test the water. If you see illegal dumping, you can report it to environmental groups. We have a lot of nonprofits in Maryland that can help escalate those concerns.
Laurie Frankel: You come away from reading the book and from conversations wanting to do something.
Emily Ranson: Clean Water Action is highly Googleable. We have a couple of more questions. To what extent do you feel your characters are still living with you?
Laurie Frankel: This book is narrated by 3 girls who are very different from one another so the reader can keep them straight. I got to know them well. I don't usually have 3 separate narrators. I had to live in their heads and go back to being a teenage girl. I go around with their eyes experiencing the world as they might. That's how you get to know them. I got to know them well. I miss them more than I often miss characters. The book has been out of my hands for about a year and can't read it again; they won't let me edit it.
Emily Ranson: One of your previous books, This is How it Always Is. It contains a good explanation of gender. A lot has changed with gender identity since the book came out. Have you noticed a difference?
Laurie Frankel: That book was written for a world that turned out to be different as well. It came out 3 days after Trump's inauguration. There was no way to see that one coming. It's a jarring reconciling that has to be done. This is the good news. The conversation surrounding gender identity was starting to happen when I started writing that book. In the last 5 years the conversations have gotten wider and easier to have. It's happening a lot. It was happening in Seattle when I started the book. I get email from people everywhere because the conversation has gotten bigger. The backlash has shifted. When the book came out, we were talking about bathrooms. Now we are talking about bullying and medical care and sports participation. It's not unmitigated good news but I do think that so many more people are talking about this. That is good news. People thought they were the only one having gender identity but not so much anymore.
Emily Ranson: One Two Three has so many intersections between economic development and the environment. What role can Blue Green Alliances play? The Greens and Blue (union) can work together for one aim. I thought of the power of this alliance when the town was making a tough decision between welcoming a polluting industry and their jobs. The alliance tries to look for the other way--spur employment while protecting the environment. Weatherizing buildings is a good way to protect the community. Big construction projects are temporary jobs. Weatherizing tends to hire local. They can be very powerful. In a town like Bourne, they would need public investment from their state or workforce development. We see this with wind turbines. You don't need a college degree. We see increasing wastewater jobs and hire local labor.
Laurie Frankel: It's not what is usually meant by universal design but that's what it means. We figure out ways for the single initiative to be good for everyone.
Emily Ranson: The last question, One Two Three is not a sequel but a companion to your other books. Explain?
Laurie Frankel: My publisher wishes I would write books more similar to each other. My forever project is wider ranges of normal; it makes the world better for everyone. This is How it Always Is -- the title comes from the notion that what embarrasses you is the same for everyone. The particulars vary. The feeling is true for everyone. We should push out the boundaries of what is considered normal. Bourne is unusual and the people have suffered but they know that the label and diagnoses and notion that surround them aren't necessarily what they seem. People in this town think there's something wrong with them. That's what all my books are about. It's my forever project.
Emily Ranson: I enjoyed the one scene that ends with "Eep!"
Laurie Frankel: Thank you. This is one of the most unique book conversations I've ever been a part of.
Emily Ranson: Thank you both so much and have a wonderful night.
Laurie Frankel/Emily Ranson
The Ivy Bookshop
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Emily Rosen: Hi everyone--thanks so much for being here tonight. We'll let everyone get settled and start in a few moments.
Thank you for being here. I am Emily Rosen and am the outreach manager for the Ivy Bookshop. We're excited to have Laurie Frankel here to talk about her new book One Two Three. It has been passed around among the staff members. It's about a fight for justice across generations in a small town. Bourne is a small town and the first moving truck arrived after years and it's about the Mitchell sisters. I loved this book and I had just watched Erin Brockovich for the first time. This was a good companion piece.
Laurie Frankel is an award-winning author of several books including This is How it Always Is. She lives in Seattle with her husband and border collie and makes good soup. She is joined by Emily Ranson. At Clean Water she works for advocacy and their mission is to protect our environment and quality of life. They work to solve environmental community problems.
You can post questions in the chat for Emily and Laurie and hopefully we'll have some good conversation. I will turn it over to them now. Thank you so much.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you for doing this; I appreciate it. I brought this mug and have had coffee out of it every morning. I'm happy to be in Baltimore. Thank you Susan for doing captioning. Emily and I will have a conversation and it will be different from most book events.
One of the funny things about the book is that it has different themes and directions. I have lots of questions and put yours in the chat.
Emily Ranson: I read the book and it was really interesting to see how clean water policy and legislation and lawsuits all tie together in this package narrated by three teenage girls. One Two Three is about redefining the assumptions we make. How did this perspective come to be a major part of the story?
Laurie Frankel: All of those elements are strange out of the mouths of teenagers. They were a pain in the ass. They are children and don't know what they're talking about. They're in a small town with a dark past. They have been harmed by the river that runs through their town and their groundwater. They are very naïve about the politics and science. They grew up drinking up the water and their mother is in a class action lawsuit against the polluters. You need characters who know everything and often nothing.
Emily Ranson: It sounds like the daughters are having a different experience than what you've had.
Laurie Frankel: I spent most of my childhood in Maryland and I spent most of my time in the creek and clean water was very important. I visit regularly and my kids spend time in the creek. We all lived downstream. That's the answer to that question. I didn't grow up in a small town and wasn't wronged like the people in this town. They have a variety of challenges. I wasn't exposed to water like that.
It takes picking up a newspaper every day to read about towns like this. The town in the book is not locatable; you can't tell where it is. It could be anywhere. It is sobering that we all live downstream. It's not a problem happening somewhere else. You can't have that attitude. Problems that seem to be elsewhere are coming to you. Your water may have this problem. We've learned the value of community this year; help one another. In writing about someone else, I hope I've written about everybody.
Emily Ranson: I grew up in Howard County as well and neighborhood creeks got me interested in clean water advocacy. Throughout most places, we assume if the water is clear, it's clean. They town sounded an alarm that there was a smell but it turned green they got the attention of the government and the news. Just because water is clear doesn't mean it's clean. With all the thunderstorms, we have sewage runoff into the water. You shouldn't be touching natural waterways until 24 hours after a rainstorm. It's very common and people don't think about it. I know some kids who got sick after playing in their backyard when the creek overflowed. They had no idea.
Laurie Frankel: Emily, you're killing me; we were outside in the creek. It's a visual thing and it may smell or taste funny. It doesn't help you if you're in it.
Emily Ranson: That's always my public service announcement. Everything comes back to waste; it's a major issue and is near and dear to our waterways in Maryland. It sounded like talking about the chemical that it was PFAS.
Laurie Frankel: I read an article about a town in West Virginia downstream from a chemical plant that had PFAS. It takes a long time to exact justice for that level of horror. I read the article and ruminated about what became the theme of this book. I read about chemicals in the paper all over the country.
Emily Ranson: If you aren't familiar with PFAS, you start to see it more and more in articles. It's the Teflon pan, the coating in your hiking boots, it's in pesticides. A couple of organizations in Maryland just did some testing of mosquito sprays and there is PFAS present in those as well. It's a forever chemical. It can't be disposed of. It spreads further when you burn it. A lot of early testing came from North Carolina where a DuPont plant manufactured it and it polluted drinking water. It's a forever chemical. We don't have to know how to dispose of something before we use it.
Laurie Frankel: I had to pack it in fiction because the new stories are so anger inducing. I feel so powerless; I need to have water. Chemicals are not usually listed on products so there's no avoiding them. You might go to the company and ask them to stop using it. The answer is that they know it's terrible but they won't stop using it and you can't stop using water. This is the point of our living downstream; you can't get away from it and you are powerless. My response is wrap it in fiction. Look at the teenage characters and you feel for them. It boils down to bad and heartbreaking news. I'm so uplifting today.
Emily Ranson: Many companies have announced that they are not using it anymore especially on food packaging. Many outdoor companies use it to make coats water resistant and they are stopping using it. Maybe a rain jacket just can't be waterproofed without these chemicals. With wool you can be warm and wet.
Laurie Frankel: I have been reading that they are replacing these chemicals with things that aren't an improvement.
Emily Ranson: That is the tricky thing with PFAS; it's thousands of chemicals, not just one. Alternatives are chemicals in the same class. It's expensive to do the health studies on 1000+ chemicals.
Laurie Frankel: It's difficult to do the studies as well. The book is about the articles report on the spills and leakages and have long-term health consequences. You have to look long term and it hasn't happened with some of the chemicals. You have to go back later and look. I went into that with the book; what does it look like in 20 years? It's a difficult thing to pinpoint. The goal is to avoid blame.
Emily Ranson: It's a wide variety of cancers and neurological impacts. How often do we see that like with Roundup? How do you prove it was a chemical exposure? It's difficult to make the direct connection. No wonder the lawsuits and characters were stuck in a lawsuit for so long.
Laurie Frankel: Some of it isn't in good faith; cause and effect are difficult to pinpoint. Who's to say what caused the injuries you suffered? When you bring in the issue on top of it with other chemicals, it's complicated.
Emily Ranson: I want to talk about the characters. You described it as a super hero story. The daughters will save you.
Laurie Frankel: We have no shortage of super hero stories. They are everywhere. They are often the same story over and over. They tend to be male, a super hero working on his own. He triumphs because he's fast and strong and leaves great swaths of destruction. Girl super heroes are different. One of the heroes comments that girls don't get a lot of credit for their strength. They gossip about what goes on in their town and it's silly and frivolous, but in fact it's a strength. They work together and save the world. They don't have the super speed and strength so work around them. They can't climb a building or lift cars. It gets written off. The strengths people have can make a difference. I wanted to look at how 3 teenage girls who had been wronged figured out a way to get justice.
Emily Ranson: In the book they bring up SAT vocabulary words. As a writer, how did you maintain this balance of words?
Laurie Frankel: You probably know what that word is but they may not use them right because they're kids. They're getting rid of the SATs. It was set in 2018 and now they don't have to learn vocabulary for the SATs. At the beginning the girls all sounded like me. I'm not a genius but am smarter than I was at 16. Their vocabulary might be more impressive than it normally would be. One of them is super smart. I looked up some of those words too when I needed a big word.
Emily Ranson: You said this novel was about the gap between the rich and poor; it's about the have-nots. You wrote it pre-Covid 19. Have your thoughts evolved?
Laurie Frankel: You hate to hit it with the global pandemic. I've been thinking about what happens when the book is written for a world that doesn't exist anymore. Until this year, we knew maybe how connected we all are but didn't think about it that much. Some communities have gotten the short end of a lot of sticks. I'm blessed to not have grown up there. This year we have learned that there is no "over there;" it's "over here." Water flows and it isn't up to me. The lines we draw and stories with tell aren't really true. We have seen remarkable support of one another this year and wide, broad communities. We've seen a lot of banding together around the world. This is also in this book. This is not something that you want to predict; it's been a difficult year.
Emily Ranson: The townspeople hope that economic develop will bring a hospital; there are few healthcare options.
Laurie Frankel: People think that if they got jobs and healthcare, maybe they would get a hospital. Baltimore and Seattle are big cities but it's happening close by, not far away.
Emily Ranson: Think about the inequities of the vaccine rollout.
Laurie Frankel: What if you don't have transportation? We build housing that's not near infrastructure. People need to get to the things they need.
Emily Ranson: In the book, one thing that gets brought up is that there is no bus because there's no place for a bus to go. That's an optimistic viewpoint of why they don't have transportation in Bourne. One character mentions how accessible Bourne is for people in wheelchairs. They don't have sidewalks. Was Bourne a sweet spot of a small town?
Laurie Frankel: It's at both ends of the spectrum and a utopic place to live. It's the idea of universal design. Bourne works for everyone in it. Everything works for everyone. They are not normal and are in a small contained space. Both of these things are true at the same time.
Emily Ranson: The first question in the chat: How does economic status and class affect who is exposed and how problems are handled?
Laurie Frankel: When I started reading these articles and looking into the issue, it seemed that maybe these factories and plants and farms and companies happened to be where land was cheap or there was a lot of land. But no, of course not. It's systemic injustice and environmental injustice. The plants are where they are because those are the people who don't have the political power to object hard enough to do anything about it. That is not accidental. It's systemic injustice. You live in a beautiful house and your water probably has the chemicals in it, but they're linked indirectly.
Emily Ranson: One way I find powerful is one of the strongest predictors of health is your ZIP code. They tend to be low-income ZIP codes and people of color. They don't go into wealthy neighborhoods. Think about large chicken houses on the Eastern Shore. People sometimes purchase the property to prevent a big chicken house in their neighborhood. People without the capital get surrounded by the polluting industry.
Laurie Frankel: It is the plan to put the chickens and runoff in places where people can't afford to object to it. It's a staggering injustice.
Emily Ranson: In the book, on this thread of how corporations and moneyed interests get what they want. If you don't have the capital to protect, you're more likely to get pollution. The attorney has a pessimistic view of legislation.
Laurie Frankel: There's a team in giant corporations and they impact legislation. You need to afford a nice house and a lobbying group and they probably don't have that. It's not set up to serve the individual.
Emily Ranson: It's a good plug for campaign finance reform. We have it increasingly happening in Maryland. Candidates can opt into a matching program. They can't take money from corporations. To qualify, they have to have a minimum number of donors from their district. Grassroots candidates are more viable.
Laurie Frankel: Is it working in Maryland?
Emily Ranson: One county used the program and they got elected. Baltimore City is pursuing something similar. There was a ballot question.
Laurie Frankel: That's really good.
Emily Ranson: It's about trying to empower the people. Having a robust advocacy community is a huge help. In Maryland there are groups that test the water. If you see illegal dumping, you can report it to environmental groups. We have a lot of nonprofits in Maryland that can help escalate those concerns.
Laurie Frankel: You come away from reading the book and from conversations wanting to do something.
Emily Ranson: Clean Water Action is highly Googleable. We have a couple of more questions. To what extent do you feel your characters are still living with you?
Laurie Frankel: This book is narrated by 3 girls who are very different from one another so the reader can keep them straight. I got to know them well. I don't usually have 3 separate narrators. I had to live in their heads and go back to being a teenage girl. I go around with their eyes experiencing the world as they might. That's how you get to know them. I got to know them well. I miss them more than I often miss characters. The book has been out of my hands for about a year and can't read it again; they won't let me edit it.
Emily Ranson: One of your previous books, This is How it Always Is. It contains a good explanation of gender. A lot has changed with gender identity since the book came out. Have you noticed a difference?
Laurie Frankel: That book was written for a world that turned out to be different as well. It came out 3 days after Trump's inauguration. There was no way to see that one coming. It's a jarring reconciling that has to be done. This is the good news. The conversation surrounding gender identity was starting to happen when I started writing that book. In the last 5 years the conversations have gotten wider and easier to have. It's happening a lot. It was happening in Seattle when I started the book. I get email from people everywhere because the conversation has gotten bigger. The backlash has shifted. When the book came out, we were talking about bathrooms. Now we are talking about bullying and medical care and sports participation. It's not unmitigated good news but I do think that so many more people are talking about this. That is good news. People thought they were the only one having gender identity but not so much anymore.
Emily Ranson: One Two Three has so many intersections between economic development and the environment. What role can Blue Green Alliances play? The Greens and Blue (union) can work together for one aim. I thought of the power of this alliance when the town was making a tough decision between welcoming a polluting industry and their jobs. The alliance tries to look for the other way--spur employment while protecting the environment. Weatherizing buildings is a good way to protect the community. Big construction projects are temporary jobs. Weatherizing tends to hire local. They can be very powerful. In a town like Bourne, they would need public investment from their state or workforce development. We see this with wind turbines. You don't need a college degree. We see increasing wastewater jobs and hire local labor.
Laurie Frankel: It's not what is usually meant by universal design but that's what it means. We figure out ways for the single initiative to be good for everyone.
Emily Ranson: The last question, One Two Three is not a sequel but a companion to your other books. Explain?
Laurie Frankel: My publisher wishes I would write books more similar to each other. My forever project is wider ranges of normal; it makes the world better for everyone. This is How it Always Is -- the title comes from the notion that what embarrasses you is the same for everyone. The particulars vary. The feeling is true for everyone. We should push out the boundaries of what is considered normal. Bourne is unusual and the people have suffered but they know that the label and diagnoses and notion that surround them aren't necessarily what they seem. People in this town think there's something wrong with them. That's what all my books are about. It's my forever project.
Emily Ranson: I enjoyed the one scene that ends with "Eep!"
Laurie Frankel: Thank you. This is one of the most unique book conversations I've ever been a part of.
Emily Ranson: Thank you both so much and have a wonderful night.