Life lately + Stuff I've read

 

It's been rather quiet around these parts lately, largely in part to the whole getting married, honeymooning, and flying back to Australia hullabaloo. Stephen and I arrived in Sydney a week ago, and between unpacking, organising our new home, getting back into regular schedules and leaving our laptop charger in the States, a chance to blog simply refused to appear. Naturally, part of me wants to sit and write about these precious, early days of marriage and how we're loving this life together. 

But then I remember how long it's been since I blogged about a book...

My November novel was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. It's a title I've heard time and again, and when I saw a copy for $10 in the airport, I thought I'd give it a shot. And may I just say, it was a shot well taken.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the most perfect coming-of-age story. It resonates in a way that feels far more real than much of today's popular coming-of-age literature (I think the term "literature" is used loosely), inviting the reader not only to sit in that familiar place of I've been there, but also challenging him or her to experience something new. It's a story of growing up in Brooklyn, becoming the sort of person that can flourish in any circumstance, much like a tree growing up between blocks of sidewalk, and the countless ways in which growing up feels unfinished and uncertain.

This book, it gets me. It is so many things that I have found myself being, from a young girl feeling somehow out of place to a young adult unsure if this is how everyone else feels when they reach certain milestones. Sure, Smith's novel finishes with the protagonist, Francie, turning 16 and getting ready for a date and I'm 24 and newly married, but even in the countless differences, there are gorgeous similarities.

The writing is beautiful, in a way that it so rarely is anymore. What I love most about this story is that it ends totally unfinished. Sure, there's a sense of resolution, but far greater than that sense of resolution is the sense that there is more to come, that as life progresses, so do our stories. We ought to find ourselves within these pages, but we ought not to stay there.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was the perfect wedding week story. It carried me to fond memories and then released me into a grand future and even though this post is obviously Stuff I've read, it's also everything that has happened lately and all the things that are about to.

I'm home now, and I hope you'll keep letting me share this adventure with you.

Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a great bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only thing: to trample on some other woman...it was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little conssequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on dividing the line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

My Dressember adventure is going strong and has been such fun; I'll be writing about it, and other life things, soon. In the meantime, if you'd like to make a donation to the Dressember Foundation, click here.