The Brooklyn Power Throuple Making Space for a Baby
Literary couple Daniel and Grace Lavery and their partner, Lily Woodruff, are all living and working full time in their Brooklyn apartment.
It’s a Monday morning in March, and Danny Lavery is up first to quietly bake the bread he proofed the night before and to walk the two little dogs Maxim Casaubon Lavery (goes by Bon Bon) and Huckleberry Rigaud Lavery (prefers Gogo). Danny and the dogs are, for now, alone in the early-to-bed, early-to-rise camp. His wife, Grace Lavery, gets up a little later, and Lily Woodruff is liable to sleep in as well. Lily has a number of projects to attend to, but at the forefront is gestating the household’s baby. Waiting for a baby here mostly entails talking. “When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” says Lily later as we curl up on the couch in their Brownstone Brooklyn living room. “I don’t know if you guys agree with that or not.” “I’m just picturing a little Bob Newhart baby,” Danny says. “Oh!” Grace says, then realizes, relieved. “I was thinking of Bob Ross.”
Danny met Grace, an academic, in 2015, two years after the birth of The Toast, a sly and chaotic website that also made Danny’s co-founder, Nicole Cliffe, a beloved internet presence; it closed up shop with a eulogy from Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2019, he turned 33, married Grace, took her last name, and broke contact with his family, publicly holding his pastor father to account for choices you’d never want your pastor to make. As now perhaps the most famous trans couple of a certain slice of literary America, they decamped abruptly from California to New York.
A year after the Lavery wedding, Grace met Lily online. Lily was teaching art history at Michigan State and — by her account — “reading Killing Eve fan fiction and masturbating.” They fell for each other. Eventually, Lily came to visit Grace in the city; specifically, she borrowed an apartment in Manhattan and dressed up as a clown for part of the evening. Lots of sexting ensued. Two things led to another, or one thing led to two others. “I didn’t want to read more fan fiction,” Lily says. “I wanted my life to resemble fan fiction.” She wanted to join their gang is how Grace considers it. Eventually, Lily moved in. (It would probably interest you to know, because we’re all nosy, that, yes, they all sleep in the same bed. It also doesn’t seem particularly large.)
“For a long time, I didn’t want to have a baby because I was worried about what the world’s going to look like,” Lily says. She is in the middle of the seating arrangement, flanked by Grace and Danny. But in the summer of 2022, her point of view, which was previously and naturally quite pessimistic, changed. She began to see having a baby as an endorsement of optimism, a tribute to love — exactly why anyone has a baby. When you’re in love, cheesily, you want there to be more love. Discussion of a child reactivated a long-on-hold conversation between Danny and Grace from before the entire subject of family became off-putting. They all sat down for a long talk right here in the living room. Grace was eager to do it but wanted to have a baby only if Danny was onboard too. Danny agreed. “If you had asked me whether I’d wanted to have children when I was about 8, I probably would have said something like, ‘Yes, but only if I can do it with a few of my friends and I don’t have to get pregnant,’ ” he says. “And if I had said that, I would have been impressed today with my powers of manifestation.”
They planned to name this baby Rochbert “Rocco” Ozymandias Wolverine, though they wanted to get a peek at him first to be sure. Have they done any legalwork in preparation for the child? “We’re aware of what the legalwork should be,” Danny says. “I fucking keep forgetting to email the lawyer,” Grace says. Where will you put this baby? I ask. “In the bassinet,” Lily says matter-of-factly.
The bassinet happens to be in a large converted closet off the living room, which is where Danny’s and Grace’s desks are. Lily’s workstation is a messy desk tucked into that weird space atop the final flight of stairs that all brownstones have and that people never seem to know what to do with. These desks are all in active use, though Lily and Grace aren’t teaching this semester. While they wait for the baby, there are various things to work on. Danny has his newsletter for Substack; Grace is writing a historical turned sci-fi novel about constitutional law, Lily an article about the film artist Amar Kanwar; and Danny says he is reading a book about Elaine May for the New York Review of Books and writing, to keep himself amused, “a Murder, She Wrote–style comedy called Murder Most Noticeable.” Galleys for his first novel, Women’s Hotel, are imminent. (He describes it as “a very quiet novel of observations about people living in a women’s hotel that is modeled after writers whose work did not outlive them hugely.”) They would like to stay in New York, and they hope it works out. Right now, this includes Danny getting a day job. On the weekends, he is working with senior-citizen artists. “It’s $18 an hour,” he says. “We were kind of talking about if we are not able to make it work, we’ll go where we have to. But I would love to get to stay here if possible.”
Because Grace and Lily were intimate first, and because they’re all living and working together in a floor-through, one-bathroom apartment, Lily and Danny were a bit on tiptoes together, even into the pregnancy. Then they had their first good fight in December — over recycling! “There were ways in which I still felt like you and I would sometimes be on our ‘company manners’ around each other,” Danny says. “I think the outcome has been really positive,” Lily says. “I’m really sorry we had to go through my being a dick,” Danny says. This is their method. Danny describes it as “lesbian dominant” with an asterisk: “I don’t mean that in the sense of we’re dominant lesbians. I just mean we all have enough of a background in lesbianism and the processing of the lesbian school, which not all lesbians do, or have to do, or should do, but which does exist. I think we all like it. There will absolutely, I’m sure, come a day when our son is like, ‘I went over to someone else’s house and they don’t fucking do this all day. I didn’t know you could live with such beautiful quiet.’ Maybe that will be one of the ways in which heterosexuality will reintroduce itself back to our home.”
Not yet. For instance: Danny says that sometimes, when they’re at their desks, he’ll read something he’s working on out loud to the group. “When I’m reading it to you, I want suggestions on improving it, and I want a reaction,” he says. “Often, you want me to laugh,” Grace says. “That’s what I mean by a reaction,” Danny says. The other night, he was reading and nobody laughed, which he expressed to them. “I feel like part of the thing I was doing in that moment was acknowledging the ways in which I can be a diva,” he says. “I love your diva side,” Grace says, “and I think that because people often point out my diva side, your diva side gets underrecognized and underappreciated, and I just admire it very much and I love it and I think it’s a form of serious care in your work that I really appreciate.”
They tend to call it quits at different times, Danny tells me as we walk back toward the dining room. He, for one, has his teeth brushed by 8:30 p.m. Lily and Grace will often have a meal at about 10 p.m. — horrifying and decadent! Around midnight, Danny will climb into bed. He gamely demonstrates his nighttime ritual, wrapping his head in a cotton shirt and leaving a decent hole for his snout. It makes him look like a contented comic character who has successfully solved for a dramatic toothache. Then he’ll pat the bed, trying to summon everyone to settle down with him.
On April 3, Rocco was born. Grace says that by the time he arrived, she had talked with a lawyer.