“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (post 2): Francie’s lying, due to her mythopoetic alternate personality, suggests she become a fiction writer

As noted in post 1, when Francie was alone, an alternate personality made up, and told her, stories. However, she was not always alone. And by the time she was ten, she was making things up and telling lies to her parents and teacher.

“She hated whatever that thing was inside her that made her invent such whoppers…Lately, she had been given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists. Katie [her mother] was annoyed at this tendency and kept warning Francie to tell the plain truth and to stop romancing. But Francie just couldn’t tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it.

“Although Katie had this same flair for coloring incident and Johnny [Francie’s father] himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their child…"

Fortunately, a kind teacher told her: “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.”

“It was the best advice Francie ever got…Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing” (1, pp. 198-199).

Comment

What was once thought of as “the mythopoetic function of the unconscious” (2, p. 318), I would reframe as the proclivity of some alternate personalities to make up stories. And for such a person, fiction writing is a natural choice.

1. Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [1943]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

2. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970.