Posts Tagged ‘a tree grows in brooklyn’

(Or should I say “piece bag” a la Little Women?)

Happy Monday!  Ish.  I do have happy news to report…The Heroine’s Bookshelf just got a Brazilian book deal! The book will be translated into Portuguese and sold as a trade paperback and ebook by Casa da Palavra within the next year or so.  Whoever would have thought that my little book would be available in Italian, Korean, and now Portuguese…? 

Other things of note: 

The Great Gone With the Wind Readalong presses on.  If you haven’t had a chance to participate in our Part 1 discussion yet, you can do so here. 

On a GWTW note, I was devastated to hear that How We Do Run On: A GWTW Scrapbook is closing down shop.  They’ve been ardent supporters of the blog and the book and their blog on the history and mastery of Gone With the Wind is truly one of the best on any topic I’ve ever encountered. 

Lest you think this blog is now all Gone With the Wind, all the time, I have another ending to report:  the ending of Bitch Magazine’s YA book club with a great discussion of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  I’m so thankful to Ashley at Bitch and my co-conspirators for making it a truly memorable and challenging project, and I encourage anyone who’s into feminist critiques of pop culture to check out Bitch and consider subscribing to the magazine.  

Finally, I’m really sad about the closing of Borders stores nationwide.  I’ve read lots of smack-talk about big-box stores over the last several weeks, and while I love my indie book store (huge shouts to Boulder Book Store, one of my favorite places on earth!), I think there’s room for more than one kind of retailer in the bookish landscape.  No matter what your opinion on Borders, I think we can all agree that its passing means big things for the publishing industry, the bookselling business, and the 11,000 or so passionate, bookish employees who now find themselves out of work.  So if you’re planning on attending one of those big liquidation sales, remember that Borders’ passing means a lot more than just a huge discount on your favorite book.  This concludes my random semi-rant

…but not to my life as a newly published author!

Holy cats.  What a week.

First:  the debut.  The joy of seeing the Amazon button turn to “add to cart” instead of “preorder.”  The mystery of a nearly standing-room-only crowd at the Boulder Book Store.  Then, yesterday, an awesome reading at Tattered Cover and now many schemes and plans as I get ready for The Littlest Book Tour (New York, Wellesley, Boston)!  I’m going to finally meet so many of my Twitter and Facebook fans in person, and get to say hi to classmates from as far back as elementary school.  I truly am a lucky woman.

Here’s a roundup of the latest fun coverage (with more to come)!

Austenacious gets excited without even having read the book…
Beyond Little House speaks to me about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her place on a heroine’s bookshelf, while Nancy Cleaveland questions whether the Ingalls really dug up their potatoes…
Melodye shares some tea and lots of sympathy on the writing process…
I share some reasons to reread a book today at Rambling Designs…
Skirt! hearts THB…
Gone with the Wind Scrapbook considers the book…
…and BookLady reviews the book, then invites me to weigh in!  I, of course, decide to talk about bitches.

Little Laura Jernegan, a girl who traveled the world on a whale ship during the 1860s, made quite the splash on the Internet yesterday (thanks, Wendy McClure, for passing on the link).  Her journal, written when she was six years old, records her thoughts on various animals, the smells of whaling, her fearsome penmanship, and not knowing what’s for supper.  The overall impression is one of a feisty, feckless girl, a real-life heroine living out an adventure right out of a novel.

To wit:

I am in Honolulu. it is a real pretty place. Mama is making a dress for me. papa is up north where it is cold. he will come back pretty soon. I have two kittens here and one aboard the ship. good by for today.

LOVE.

Anyway, it got me thinking…you don’t have to be a grown woman to be a heroine.  After all, our first encounter with Jane Eyre is when she is a small thing, curled up on the windowsill reading a book.  Francie Nolan transforms from skinny child to woman-too-soon in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  And Laura Ingalls is young indeed in most of the Little House books.

These young girls remind me of my friend’s daughter Addie, to whom I read approximately 13232532623234623456 books on a recent babysitting excursion, and my niece September, who is spunky and prideful enough for any storybook.

I get excited just thinking about it…what heroism is in their cards?  Did you show signs of heroism as a little girl?

There are some books you come back to again and again at different points in your life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that kind of book, so imagine my pleasure to see that Harper Perennial’s 2010 book club covered the book for January.

Writing a chapter on ATGIB and Betty Smith was one of the most challenging tasks ahead of me when I set out to write The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  It wasn’t just that Betty Smith’s life is so poorly documented overall, it’s that ATGIB is a tome, a weighty book with tons of moving parts.  It’s hard to wrap your brain around. Part of that, I think, is because it is a book of myriad intentions. Betty wrote it after an incredibly challenging childhood and adult life, from her roles as a tormented mother, a jilted wife, an uncomfortable harborer of desperate alcoholic men, and a sometimes quite literally starving artist.  She also wrote it as an advocate for the poor, a woman who worked for a radical WPA-sponsored theater project and who had gotten her education in poverty firsthand.  So I think it makes sense that the readings and comments I’m seeing are grappling with the book as a mother/daughter tale, a family drama, and a kind of anti-poverty social document.

Katie Nolan isn’t the main character of the book per se, but she becomes its core and its focal point, the woman who’s trying to hold her family together even as she drives it apart with her own desperation.  On my latest reread, I was astonished at how much nuance and pain Betty was able to give Katie.  Sometimes the book is physically hard to read.  You see Katie, her body broken and her life prospects completely dashed, covering up the hands that she’s used to drag her family through some semblance of life in shame, and you want to curl up in the fetal position or start drinking or something.  Except that that would never, ever fly with hard Katie.

For me, Katie’s uncompromising way of looking at the world pairs perfectly with Betty Smith’s mission in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:  to make us look at the sordid, ugly, filthy sides of life alongside the beautiful and uplifting ones and to take all sides into our final reckoning.  And with so much nuance and pain, it’s no wonder I come back to the book I first read as a Francie-aged girl every few years, scared but hungry for Betty’s unvarnished look at life.

Well, some writers must have an ivory tower but I need trouble.

- Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn