Posts Tagged ‘betty smith’

One of the motivations behind The Heroine’s Bookshelf was to remind readers (and myself) that we are protagonists of our own lives.  Call me egotistical, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t see ourselves as heroines, stars of our own particularly tricky novels, no matter how mundane or convoluted.

Tonight I had the pleasure of speaking with the North Metro Area Writers’ Meetup on the idea that leaning into your unique voice, purpose, and path can bolster a writing career. In my experience, when you stop thinking like a supporting character and start accepting a leading role in your writing life, interesting things happen.

Too often, we’re fed the line that writers merely have their ear to the floor, that they’re glorified secretaries taking dictation from finicky muses.  I’m never going to claim that writing isn’t (freaking) mysterious, but I do think that it’s too easy to discount ourselves in the process.  Instead of railing against the unfairness of there being approximately three story ideas ever, none of them original, we would do well to lean into what we bring to the table.

Maybe our Brooklyn childhood and WPA political schooling taught us to look out for detail about the poor immigrants who make the machine of the United States go (Betty Smith).  Maybe our brother shot us in the eye and taught us to see things slightly askew (Alice Walker).  Maybe we want to bring a bit of magic into the world (Frances Hodgson Burnett).  Each of these authors tackled the coming-of-age story, but they did it so uniquely and with such beautiful difference that we will always view them as individuals.

Along with many writers I know, I’m thinking a lot about My Next Step.  What do I bring to the table?  What do I suck at?  What can I live with?  What perspective is unique to the enthusiastically vestigial Southern Californian history nerd with the scarred-up roller derby knee and the obsession with the everyday details of history?  At times like this, I lean into the possibility of Erin-as-protagonist, secure that at the very least, I’m in good company.

One of the questions I get asked most often is “I’m a fan of [insert author here].  What books and resources should I read to find out more?”

When I wrote The Heroine’s Bookshelf, I very deliberately decided to make the book as accessible as possible…which meant excluding a bibliography or academic footnotes.  However, the history major in me demanded a very rigorous research process, and I consulted multiple books and primary sources for each chapter.

Rather than bore you with my long, snarled list of primary sources and books, I’d like to recommend some great further reading to serve as an entree into the lives of my literary heroines.  Please bear in mind that I could have written an entire book on the research materials alone, so this represents a very truncated list!

Jane Austen: If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide to all things Jane, by all means start at The Republic of Pemberley’s most impressive Selective Jane Austen Bibliography.  Great starting places include Jane’s Fame:  How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman and A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections, by James Edward Austen-Leigh, a great period document that informs Jane bios to this day.

Zora Neale Hurston: Nobody wrote about Zora’s life quite as well as Zora herself, notably in Dust Tracks on a Road, but I particularly enjoyed Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit by Deborah G. Plant.

Lucy Maud Montgomery: Maud scholarship is making huge strides, thanks in part to the L.M. Montgomery Institute and the Lucy Maud Montgomery Literary Society.  I found true inspiration and great information in Irene Gammel’s Looking for Anne of Green Gables, Mary Henley Rubio’s Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and the lovely Annotated Anne of Green Gables edited by Wendy Elizabeth Barry, Margaret Anne Doody, and Mary Doody Jones and published in a gorgeous edition by the Oxford University Press.

Alice Walker: Alice Walker is still living out her own biography.  I enjoyed Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White and Alice Walker: Critical perspectives past and present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah.

Betty Smith: I was disappointed at the dearth of biography on this amazing figure of literature, and hope that more authors take up the call to document Betty’s life in greater detail.  That said, I devoured Valerie Raleigh Yow’s Betty Smith: Life of the Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and found Carol Siri Johnson’s online dissertation on Betty Smith to be quite helpful.

Colette: Though she was a formidable, fascinating figure indeed, Americans don’t tend to pay too much attention to Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and many of her biographies are out of print.  I enjoyed Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman and found interesting information in Michele Sarde’s Colette and Colette: A Life by Herbert R. Lottman.  If anything, any book on Colette is worth peeking into for ravishing photos of the famously beautiful Colette!

Margaret Mitchell: Peggy Mitchell was notoriously…unreliable when it came to relating her own biography.  That said, Ellen Firsching Brown and John Wiley have done a stunning job with their recently-released Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood. Darden Asbury Pyron’s Southern Daughter is an entertaining starting point for more biography on Peg as opposed to the book for which she is famous.

Harper Lee: Nelle was the only other living author featured in my book, and she is notoriously private about her life to the chagrin of her fans and the detriment of her biographers.  That said, it is hard to find a biography as lovingly researched and thorough as Charles J. Sheilds’s Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: Laura’s another writer who is currently undergoing a scholarship renaissance, helped along by the amazing folks at Beyond Little House and Laurati who are doing interesting work nationwide and even worldwide.  I was particularly entranced by Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life by Pamela Smith Hill, which is hands-down my favorite Laura biography.  Other great bios include John E. Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anita Clair Fellman’s Little House, Long Shadow, and the ever-controversial The Ghost In the Little House by William Holtz, which chronicles the life and work of Rose Wilder Lane.  As far as Laura expertise, you can’t be savvier or more well-informed than the legendary William Anderson, who has made a place for himself as THE Laura expert of the ages.  Click here for a bibliography of his books and pamphlets on Laura.

Charlotte Brontë: Charlotte’s one of those women who has had books written on the books about her…there’s that much incredible information about the Brontë family.  I personally love Elizabeth Gaskell’s warm, chatty memoir about her friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, though it’s been criticized for its insistence that Charlotte was proper rather than passionate.   In case you care to read a biography on Charlotte not written in the nineteenth century, you can’t go wrong with Rebecca Fraser’s The Brontës or Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life.

Louisa May Alcott: On last count, I personally own over 10 books about Louy.  My favorites include the very innocent, anachronistic yet informative Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs and John Matteson’s unforgettable, Pulitzer-prize-winning double biography of Louisa and her father, Bronson…Eden’s Outcasts gets special mention as one of the only biographies that has both made me cry and that I have dreamt about.  Highly recommended.  That said, 2010 was a banner year for Alcott scholarship, producing both Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott:  The Woman Behind Little Women and Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott:  A Personal Biography.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: “Fluffy” Burnett was another woman I found it hard to research, since she has been shunted off to the kidlit category by many dismissive biographers.  Her lovely autobiography, The One I Knew Best of All, is barely worth mentioning for its obvious unreliability.  That said, we must content ourselves with Anne Thwaite’s dual Frances bios and Gretchen Gerzina’s Frances Hodgson Burnett, and with Gerzina’s perceptive biographical notes in the W.W. Norton Annotated Secret Garden.

“Marilla, isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

It’s that time of the year.  The time when your impossibly put-together friends announce that they are going to accomplish a Huge Goal in 2011 and then proceed to do so with a minimum of stress, pain, or evident strife.  I usually fall on the other side of the spectrum, looking toward goals but nervous about announcing them, doing what I can and lamenting what I can’t and somehow accomplishing a bunch in the middle.

However.

It has come to my attention that I’m in need of some next steps in terms of my literary career.  (I just almost typed that phrase, moved away from the keyboard, did some busywork, returned, and typed it slowly.  Oh, dear.)  Nothing earth-shattering…it’s just time I looked at what I really want, what’s next, and how I can get from Point A to Point B.

I was talking to a friend about it last night and she said “2009 you would weep over the Facebook status updates of 2010 you.”

She’s right:  2010 was a hugely productive, accomplished, and important year, and though it whipped me down it also built me up in many unexpected ways.  The best part?  Discovering my literary tribe through the readers, bloggers, book-lovers, reviewers, and allies flung all over the world…the people to whom I owe my greatest debt.  Now I get to take all of you into consideration as I ponder my literary future, too, and that is a privilege.

Anyway, my conversation with my friend reminded me that I have other allies, too…the women who wrote my favorite books and whose lives I was privileged to study and write about in The Heroine’s Bookshelf. As I look forward, I can remember that Charlotte Brontë wrote her way through grief and took an active role in her publishing career; that Betty Smith used her writing to catapult her out of the slums of Brooklyn and as a window back in.  My literary heroines spent less time agonizing over the direction of their careers than finding work they couldn’t not do.  Armed with that work, you guys, and a whole history of female writers, I think I’m well-equipped for a new day.

Footnote:  If you haven’t seen it yet, check out The Heroine’s Bookshelf as reviewed on the front page of The Washington Post’s BookWorld.  And stay tuned…I’ve got something really fun up my sleeve for February!

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