FRANCIE AND JESSE: GROWING WHERE YOU’RE PLANTED
A while ago, I introduced a rather unusual word: BILDUNGSROMAN—the literary term for a coming-of-age story.
One of my favorite examples is Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
Francie Nolan grows up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Her family struggles to make ends meet. Her father loves his family, but his drinking creates hardship and uncertainty. Francie learns early that growing up sometimes means facing things children shouldn’t have to face.
That sounds familiar to me.
Jesse Hall, the boy at the center of my “Searching for Family” series, grows up decades later in Ohio. His family also struggles with poverty. His father’s alcoholism brings fear and instability into the home. Jesse learns to work, accept responsibility, deal with disappointment, and keep going when life doesn’t seem fair.
Francie and Jesse are the same age but living in very different places.
But both are growing.
That’s one reason the title “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” has always seemed so powerful to me. The tree in Betty Smith’s story manages to grow in a place where you wouldn’t expect much of anything to flourish.
Children can do that, too.
Sometimes growing up isn’t about having the perfect home, the perfect parents, or an easy childhood. Sometimes it’s about discovering hope when circumstances give you plenty of reasons to lose it.
Francie did.
Jesse does.
And perhaps, somewhere along the way, most of us have had to learn how to grow where we were planted.
Have you read “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?” What do you remember most about Francie and her story?