You've Got to Read This Book!: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life

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Chapter One

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard is a critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling author. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the first book selected for Oprah's Book Club and was made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer. She has written five other novels and three children's books. A newspaper reporter since 1976, she now writes a nationally syndicated column for Tribune Media Services and travels to promote awareness of colorectal cancer, which took the life of her first husband, award-winning reporter Dan Allegretti. Jacquelyn lives on an old farm south of Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband Chris Brent and their seven children, who range in age from 4 months to 22 years.

A few years ago, on my birthday, a simple box arrived in the mail from my dear friend and agent, Jane Gelfman. When I opened it and saw what it contained, tears welled up in my eyes. It was a first edition of the book that I loved more than any other: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The copy was inscribed lovingly by the author, Betty Smith, to her own agent, and tucked inside were letters she had written, preserved just as they were 60 years ago. At this point, even my children, gathered around the dinner table, grew misty eyed. They knew how I felt about this book, its author, and its heroine.

Some months before, I had herded my three teenaged sons into a budget screening of the newest movie production of Little Women. They entered that theater as willingly as accused felons being led to jail while TV cameras rolled—their coats hunched over their faces, lest they encounter anyone they knew.

Afterward, however, they realized why Little Women was required reading in our house full of little men, along with a couple of other "girl" books, including National Velvet and, of course, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. My son Dan, who, before puberty and Limp Bizkit hit simultaneously, was known to us as "the sensitive one," said as we got into the car, "I get it. When you were a kid, you wanted to be Jo March, didn't you, Mom?"

I had to admit it—I did want to be Jo, the brilliant young heroine of Little Women, growing up with a gentle, endlessly patient mother and a brave, wise, and superbly educated father; surrounded by books, piano music, genteel poverty, and noble breeding, in a large house shaded by old trees and with handsome boys next door. But I knew, and my children knew, I was Francie Nolan, the plucky, resourceful star of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Like Francie, I'd been an urban child; I recognized the Brooklyn tree that Betty Smith describes in the book's epigraph:

". . . Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that . . . survives without sun, water and seemingly, without earth. It would be considered beautiful, except that there are too many. . . ."

There were trees like that on the West Side of Chicago, too. I'd lived in an apartment there when I was small. My aunt and uncle lived downstairs and my grandparents lived one building over. Everyone was either a plumber or a bricklayer. Our family, though always employed, definitely aspired to the lower-middle class. But I was the daughter of parents who never finished high school: a mother devoted to books and to my only brother and me, and an alcoholic father who worked so long and played so hard, we barely saw him. Our extended family was large, sometimes raucously loving, and sometimes raucously violent. The laughter was often too loud; the songs beautiful, but the words often slurred. Books were a shelter and a friend to me when that shelter wasn't available in real life.

My mother sought that shelter, too. Long before Oprah, she read the great books: Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. She didn't realize that she was too uneducated—that those books were not meant for her. She always brought home the very best things to read from the library. She gave me the message that nothing was off limits for me, that the circumstances of my birth would not contain me, and that as long as I could learn, I could never be a prisoner of my circumstances.

One day when I was 12 she gave me A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Since that day, I've read it 11 times. I have a tradition of reading it before every book that I write. A work of fiction, it's a beautiful portrayal of urban poverty, and very gritty. We think of it as a book for little seventh-grade girls, but it isn't. It's a book in which there are terrifying things: alcoholism and child abuse and children in terribly dangerous circumstances caused by neglect.

Yet Francie's mother, Katie, makes Francie's life a stable place and points her toward education—in Francie's case, secretarial school, though she wants to be a writer. Katie teaches her that education is the only way to leave behind the kind of life in which she's grown up—the life of a tree forcing its way through the cracks in the cement, surviving on not much more than its own fierce will to live. Her mother was the person who best understood Francie's life ambitions and how difficult they were going to be to achieve. I was struck by how understanding her mother was of Francie as she matured—it reminded me of my own mother, who was the same way with me until she died when I was 19.

Francie Nolan did grow up to be a writer. Reading her story as a child, I felt she was showing me . . .

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Excerpted from You've Got to Read This Book!: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life by Gay Hendricks, Jack Canfield
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