How I Became a Tree

by Sumana Roy

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Pub Date 31 Aug 2021 | Archive Date 23 Nov 2021

Yale University Press

Biographies & Memoirs | History

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Description

An exquisite, lovingly crafted meditation on plants, trees, and our place in the natural world, in the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Sumana Roy has written—grown—a radiant and wondrous book.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

“Beautiful. . . . Roy weaves together science, nature, personal narrative, literature, sociology, and more to keep the reader turning pages—and to turn us all into tree-lovers.”—Kateri Kramer, The Rumpus

“I was tired of speed. I wanted to live to tree time.” So writes Sumana Roy at the start of How I Became a Tree, her captivating, adventurous, and self-reflective vision of what it means to be human in the natural world.

Drawn to trees’ wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with trees—from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves.

Hailed upon its original publication in India as “a love song to plants and trees” and “an ode to all that is unnoticed, ill, neglected, and yet resilient,” How I Became a Tree blends literary history, theology, philosophy, botany, and more, and ultimately prompts readers to slow down and to imagine a reenchanted world in which humans live more like trees.

Advance Praise

“Sumana Roy has written—grown—a radiant and wondrous book, which roots and branches in complex, provocative ways, helping us recognize trees for the ‘strange strangers’ they are, companion-citizens with which we think and remember, yes, but also alien beings that draw love, hate, indifference, and even lust from us humans.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

"A poetic, probing meditation on how trees are, to paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, 'good to think with.' Sumana Roy gives us a fresh and surprising look at a topic as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, or to put it another way, almost as old as the oldest living trees."—Robert Moor, best-selling author of On Trails: An Exploration

“This is one of the most original, delightful, inspiring books I have read in a long time. It will enchant and move the reader with its unique imaginative mindset, its humorous touches, and its defiance of convention.”—Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University

“A genuinely exceptional work that is as poetic as it is scholarly—quirky, enlightening and enriching.”—Chandak Sengoopta, Birbeck College, University of London