For much of Brooklyn, Eilis battles feelings of homesickness as she begins a new life away from her family. Her homesickness often manifests in intense feelings of sadness as well as a physical feeling of loss as she realizes how alone she is in the city. In Part 1, as Eilis prepares to depart for Brooklyn, her brother Jack mentions his own experience with homesickness when he moved to Birmingham, and Eilis wonders why he kept it a secret: “His saying that at the beginning he would have done anything to go home was strange. It struck her that he might have told no one [...] she thought how lonely that might have been for him” (40). Jack admits to Eilis that he felt intense loneliness and could only think of going home, and yet, from her point of view, his communications to home paint a different picture. She wonders why he never mentioned the homesickness and whether he suffered through it alone. His warning to her about it foreshadows her own battle with homesickness and her unwillingness to write home about it and worry her family.

The new world of Brooklyn is at first exciting to Eilis, and she revels in her new independence.