This is a hard one.

I’d love to be able to say that I identify greatly with, say,

Arya Stark, or Joe Abercrombie’s Sand Dan Glokta. I’d love to identify with a
character who’s brave and badass and confident and has a slightly tragic
past.
But that’s not really me. I’m a student from New York who wants to become a
writer. I’m not all that special, or badass, or even particularly confident. That’s
why I identify with Francie Nolan, from Betty Smith’s classic novel A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn.
Francie has dreams, but she’s hobbled by circumstance. Her family is
dysfunctional, and she has a difficult relationship with her mother, but they all
love each other. She grows up seeing the beauty in small things, from the
scrawny tree that pokes its head up in the tenement yards to the
flowers in a bowl at her local library. She’s jealous of her brother sometimes,
and she’s scared of starting work at new places, and she falls in love with all
her heart. She’s a flawed character who reminds me of myself so much that
Braille East brain lisit almost hurts.
There was one seemingly simple detail that made me feel like this book’s
author implicitly understood me. When Francie was a child, she borrowed a
book she loved from the library, over and over. And she began to copy it into a
notebook because she couldn’t bear to return it. I had done the exact same
thing as a child, but somehow…I never managed to copy the entire book. So I
started writing my own