98 MINUTES WITH...The Lavery Family

Beloved literary couple Daniel and Grace Lavery and their partner, Lily Woodruff, are all living and working full time in their Brooklyn apartment. Now, they have to find space for a baby.

- CHOIRE SICHA

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