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Laurie Frankel is the author of six novels, including Enormous Wings (Holt, May 5, 2026), a fresh, funny, timely story of bodily autonomy, women's rights, elder rights, reproductive rights, family, love, grandmas, paparazzi, sex, profane priests, and hamsters. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and other publications. She is a recipient of the Washington State Book Award and the Endeavor Award. A former college professor, she now writes full-time in Seattle, Wash., where she lives with her family and makes good soup.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Enormous Wings is about a 77-year-old who moves into a retirement community, falls in love, falls ill, then finds out she's not sick. She's pregnant.
On your nightstand now:
Angela Flournoy's latest, The Wilderness. Sarah Domet's new one, Everything Lost Returns. T Kira Madden's new one, Whidbey. Alexandra Oliva's new one, The Radiant Dark. Sara Novic's new one, Mother Tongue. Nina LaCour's soon-to-be new one, Meet Me in the Garden. Brian Trapp's relatively new one, Range of Motion. Currently in the middle of rereading Leon Uris's (not at all new) Mila 18. And at the bottom of that teetering pile, E.L. Doctorow's (also not-remotely-new) The Book of Daniel, which somehow I've never read (possibly because it keeps getting pushed to the bottom of really tall, heavy piles).
Favorite book when you were a child:
Impossible! All of Beverly Cleary. All of Judy Blume. E.B. White, especially Charlotte's Web (still an all-time favorite). Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking books; Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings; Munro Leaf's The Story of Ferdinand, illustrated by Robert Lawson; Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline books; and, speaking of Madelines, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series; Eve Titus's Anatole books, illustrated by Paul Galdone; A.A. Milne's everything; and, speaking of bears, Michael Bond's Paddington books. John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain series. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series. This list could go on and on. I read a lot as a child.
Your top five authors:
Also impossible! How about top five(ish) living authors? Only slightly less impossible. Ruth Ozeki, Karen Joy Fowler, Naomi Alderman, David Mitchell, Percival Everett, Kate Atkinson, Omar El Akkad.
Your top five William Shakespeare plays:
Basically impossible but let's say: Hamlet (to read), As You Like It (to see), Measure for Measure (to teach), The Tempest (which I recently told the great History of Literature podcast I would choose as my deathbed read), and The Winter's Tale (for the surprise ending).
Book you've faked reading:
They actually taught this skill when I was in graduate school, or at least they assumed you had it and encouraged you to use it. Unfortunately, I am a terrible liar, so I'm not sure I've ever successfully faked reading anything. I have definitely read books I never would have had I been confident I could successfully fake that I had.
Books you're an evangelist for:
LOL there are so many books I never shut up about. Toni Morrison's Beloved, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, all 2,000-some pages of it. Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is my go-to book club rec. Naomi Alderman's The Power is my best recommendation for having your mind blown. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Percival Everett's The Trees. I will never stop recommending Joseph Heller's Catch-22. And an audiobook rec: I found Leslie Odom Jr. reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to be life-changing.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Billy Collins's Dog Show, which I could tell from the cover was going to be a book of poems a) about dogs and b) by Billy Collins. Deal. And Chris Cleave's Little Bee, not for the image on the cover but the text, the flap copy, which reads, "We don't want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it." Again, deal.
Book you hid from your parents:
Not a one. But I'll tell you about a book I had to hide from my kid. Killer Style: How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed, & Murdered Through History by Serah-Marie McMahon and Alison Matthews David, which features two half-dressed, half-rotting Victorian skeletons on the cover. My husband and I bought it at the Tate Modern for our fashion-obsessed, macabre-curious eight-year-old, and she was in no way old enough for that book. It scared the shit out of her, so it lived behind the bookshelf for many years. (She is now using it for a project for a college class, so I got back all my revoked parenting awards.)
Book that changed your life:
All of them? Maybe not all of them. But lots of them. Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go demanded, in 2008, that I start keeping notes on every single book I read to figure out how they worked and how I could write one too, a practice I maintain religiously to this day. Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats led me directly to my husband, my city, and my literary agent, so hard to overstate the change wrought by that one. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby so shook me to my 15-year-old core that I think of Nick Carraway as my high-school boyfriend. Hamlet reorders my world every time I read or see it.
Favorite line from a book:
Absolutely impossible to choose, but my wedding quote was Jaques from As You Like It: "You to a love that your true faith doth merit." (Yes of course I had a wedding quote.)
Five books you'll never part with:
I mean, you should see my house. I have 10 bookcases worth of books I'll apparently never part with, and still I have books piled on the floor, on the end tables, under the bed, double-stacked on the shelves. We had to convert the wine rack in our kitchen into bookshelves. (Priorities.) I probably need to work harder at parting with some books.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It felt like that novel and I were dating the first time I read it. I carried it everywhere. I brought that book to the grocery store with me. Also, speaking of Russians, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (from which, speaking of favorite quotes and a good note to end on: "It's pleasant sometimes to detain a holiday midnight for a while.").