The Page 69 Test: "Enormous Wings"

Monday, May 11, 2026

"Enormous Wings"

Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of six novels. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian,

The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, People Magazine, Lit Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Washington State Book Award and the Endeavor Award. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and been optioned for film and TV. A former college professor, she now writes full-time in Seattle, Washington where she lives with her family and makes good soup.

Frankel applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Enormous Wings, and shared the following:

This prompt is my favorite because it’s always so uncannily, hard-to-believe accurate. For every book I’ve written (now six!), page 69 never fails to be a perfect microcosm of the whole. And the Page 69 Test — and the fact that it works so well — never fails to blow my mind.

Enormous Wings is the story of Pepper Mills, a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother who moves into a retirement community, falls in love, and then falls ill, but when she goes to the doctor, she finds out she’s not sick; she’s pregnant. She comes home from that doctor’s appointment and, on page 69, tells Moth, her seventy-nine-year-old boyfriend, the news. At first, naturally, he thinks she’s joking. Smack dab in the middle of the page, he says, laughing, “Old age and pregnancy share a lot of the same symptoms, now I think about it.” This single sentence could be this book’s tagline and is for sure the seed of it, its central metaphor, and the point it explores for its other 284 pages.

Also on page 69, we get Pepper’s frustrations with the limitations of the health care system, her lack of options and agency on any number of fronts, her sweet relationship with Moth. We get the very present threat Pepper and Moth both live with, as people in winter of their years, that a simple moment of confusion could in fact be a stroke or the first signs of dementia, that exhaustion could just be feeling tired but might be early symptoms of something much worse, that even getting up off the bed and crossing the room saps more energy than they always have to spare. All of the above is exactly why I chose this admittedly strange premise and why I thought a pregnant seventy-seven-year-old was the perfect character to explore issues of agency, bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, family, health care, elder care, and love love love.