A Family Story Beyond Definition

Few authors compel me to read their work without first glancing at the description. Laurie Frankel is one such author, and The Atlas of Love is one such novel.

Frankel often plants her stories in the soil of non-traditional families, gently (and sometimes not so gently) dismantling society’s insistence on the heteronormative ideal—opposite-sex parents, two kids, the tidy picture of “normal.” Conventional. Predictable. Banal.

The Atlas of Love upends that construct from page one.

Janey, Jill, and Katie meet in their PhD program and become inseparable. Their academic lives—already chaotic with reading, teaching, researching—are thrown further off balance when Jill becomes pregnant. Daniel, the baby’s father and seven years Jill’s junior, wants Jill but not the child. Jill wants the child and also Dan.

And so, in a burst of logic unbefitting doctoral candidates, Janey and Katie decide that the solution is to rent a house big enough for all four of them. Dan is absolved of responsibility and disappears; Atlas, Jill’s newborn, becomes the axis around which the women’s lives spin.

What sets The Atlas of Love apart—besides being a brilliant debut—is Janey’s narration. She tells the story with the tone of someone recounting a family legend from a rocking chair beside a fireplace, but she freely admits she’s an unreliable narrator. Understandably so: raising a child with your two best friends while juggling your own quarter-life crises is bound to warp perspective.

The trio teaches, takes classes, writes, and researches on a finely tuned schedule (thanks to Katie) built entirely around Atlas. At the same time, Janey is quietly unraveling, unsure about her future and unsure, too, of what Atlas means to her.

Katie’s careful plans inevitably collapse, and the one person who initially wanted nothing to do with Atlas reappears after a year of absence. By then, Janey and Katie—more Janey than Katie, truth be told—have bonded deeply with the baby. They’re not only helping raise him; they’re raising him as their own.

But this is not a simple boy-meets-girl, girl-gets-pregnant, boy-leaves, boy-returns story. Frankel is doing something both messier and more honest.

Caring for Atlas reveals a few truths:

1. The bond between a baby and their caregivers expands in ways no tidy definition of “parent” fully covers. These women live together. They share sleep deprivation, feedings, fears, the bills and the small joys that bloom at 3 a.m.

2. Raising a child is far more complicated than idealistic young adults imagine. Sniffles become crises; teething becomes warfare; exhaustion becomes a shared language. If two caregivers are ideal, what happens when three step up—willingly, lovingly?

3. And yet, legal parenthood still matters. Paperwork, signatures, birth certificates—these arbitrarily determine who holds power when hard decisions surface.

Perhaps it’s time we admit that the old wisdom—the tidy nuclear family as the blueprint for success—misses the truth entirely.

A family is not a formula. It is a practice. A choice. A constellation of people who decide, again and again, to love a child and each other through the chaos.

Frankel gets this. Her novels, and The Atlas of Love in particular, illuminate the expansiveness of family—the ways it refuses to be confined to bloodlines or tradition, and the ways love creates structures just as real, just as formidable, as anything written into law.