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.