A Window Opens in Manhattan
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Part 2
How books Can Change Your Life
You know that feeling of picking up a book with a groan because you just know that reading it will feel like trying to walk to your destination through miles of mud? Then there are some books that you just have a good feeling about. Maybe it’s the image on the front cover (because I don't care what they say; everyone judges books by the cover). Maybe you really liked the description on the back cover, or maybe you read the first page and were hooked.
Well, I had the latter feeling about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Partly because I’d never heard about it with the same grumbling you hear about people reading William Faulkner, and partly because it's a story about New York. For me, reading about a place and then actually getting to see it with your own eyes is a magical experience. There's a familiarity, and an odd sense of being in two places at once: in a book and in reality. And I couldn't wait to experience New York like that.
From the beginning of the book, I knew that the protagonist, Francie, was a kindred spirit.
““Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library, and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world.” ”
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I felt exactly the same when I was young. It didn't matter which library or what bookstore I was in, they were all my haven, my home away from home. I could browse through the shelves endlessly and spend hours just sitting and reading. There's a scene in Gilmore Girls when Rory tells a hopeful future Yale attendee to smell an old book to really get the Yale experience. That's the sign of a true book lover right there. Yes, it seems silly, but if you've never reveled in the scent of a book, you're missing out on one of the little joys of life. I've definitely savored the scent of books, and I know that Francie would have done the same.
Just sitting in the presence of so many books was euphoric. It was as if all the characters and all the places recognized me as a fellow traveler and unreservedly invited me into their world. And even though I was a little reserved, I instantly felt at peace with every one of them. Just as they were my haven, books were the safe place for Francie.
Francie Nolan lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her Mother, Katie, her Father, Johnny, and her brother, Neely. Surrounded by poverty, a drunkard father, and precarious and harmful figures, Francie’s inhabitance in the world of books and writing sets her apart from everyone else. So, she does what any book lover would do: she asks for more. Francie pleads with her parents to move her to a different school, a better school, so she can surround herself with the knowledge she craves.
““It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds besides the world she had been born into, and that these other worlds were not unattainable.” ”
Books open your eyes and mind to worlds you could never have imagined. But they don't just invite you into their world, they bring their world into yours. Books mesh the universe of imagination into your reality. What the characters feel, you feel, what they discover, you discover. But, within the pages of the book at least, there's an end for them. You get to keep going. You get all the wisdom of a hero's journey without the battle scars. You get to turn your story around.
And that's what Francie did. There were so many times she could have settled for the life she had. A teacher crushes Francie's hope of authorship and demands that Francie burn her writing. A lack of money forces Francie to drop out of school and find a job. The death of Francie's father and the rejection of a lover shatters Francie's ties to her childhood. She has everything going against her. Though this coming of age story is filled with new adventures and triumphant achievements, it's also marked with painful realizations and loss.
While our trials may not be the same, or to the same extent as others, we still experience them nonetheless. No one gets to walk through life completely unscathed by trouble. I’m incredibly blessed, but I've endured my share of anguish and life-altering encounters. Financial worries, sexual harassment and discrimination, medical problems, and dashed hopes. Those were Francie's trials, but they're mine too.
What is it that gets you through it? What is it that made Francie’s story one of success rather than one of tragedy? Of course, she battled countless obstacles and disasters, but something fed her drive, something fueled her strength.
“She was made up of more too. She was the books she read in the library…Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard… She was all of these things, and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only, the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God, or whatever is his equivalent, puts into each soul that is given life, the one different thing such is that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike. ”
I do believe that God makes us all uniquely different, but I also believe we can gain a little extra something through other methods. I believe that something grew from the books Francie read. I believe that same something is in me because the books I’ve read have fueled that something. When life was hard, I’d retreat into a book, but reading gave me one more weapon than I had before, and I’d emerge from that book to win whatever war I was fighting.
Every word in every book plants a little seed, and those seeds take hold in your soul to give you what you need. And because of that, it's easy to see how Francie was that tree growing in Brooklyn.
“The landlord had sent two men, and they chopped it down. But the tree hadn’t died. It hadn’t died. A new tree had grown from the stump, and its trunk had grown along the ground until it reached a place where there were no washlines above it. Then it had started to grow toward the sky again… But this tree in the yard, this tree that men chopped down, this tree that they built a bonfire around trying to burn up its stump, this tree lived. It lived. And nothing could destroy it.”
And if Francie is that tree, then I am that tree, and you can be too. Flourishing among the concrete, we grow in an unexpected place as an emblem of resilience and strength. Read and grow. Read and grow.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you limes, make margaritas. When they chop down your tree, put down new roots, and begin to grow again.
Continue Reading The Gilmore Book Club
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*quotes based on the time mark in the audiobook
Main and second image in this post by Alex Tomlinson; Third image by Blaire Collins
References:
Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2018.
Gilmore Girls. Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino , season 1-7, 2000.
