I Was Amelia Earhart Jane Mendelsohn
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I Was Amelia Earhart Jane Mendelsohn
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover
146 pages
April 1996
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When Amelia Earhart disappeared off the New Guinea coast in 1937 while
attempting to fly around the world, she flew straight into our modern
mythology. The truth of what happened to this most famous aviatrix has
never been discovered, and the not-knowing fuels our
continuing fascination.
In her first novel, Jane Mendelsohn imagines what might have happened,
crafting an hypnotic fictional memoir. The Amelia Earhart presented
here is fiercely independent and unconventional, a heroine who is
sympathetic without being the least bit sentimental. Earhart muses on
her childhood, her marriage to G.P. Putnam, her love of flying, on
herself, examining her own motives and desires with a
somehow passionate dispassion, a satisfied calm belying a great deal
of potential energy.
Before the round-the-world flight attempt begins, Earhart frankly
describes her relationship with her navigator, Fred Noonan, with whom
she will shortly be marooned. In so doing, she reveals as much about
herself:
I had to take Noonan with me because we had run out of
money and he was the cheapest navigator we could find.
G.P. said he was the best, and that may have been true,
but he was definitely the cheapest. He was cheap because
he'd been fired from Pan Am for drinking and he couldn't
find another job. I didn't want to take him. I didn't
want to take anybody...We are not lovers. We have never
been lovers. We could not have been further from being
lovers unless we had never met. Neither one of us finds
the other attractive...He is persnickety, easily frightened,
and irresponsible. To him I embody the most unfeminine
qualities...I have not one self-sacrificing, maternal
bone in my unwomanly, muscular body.
When the flight goes wrong and Earhart disappears from the historical
record, it is with this man she must survive. On the island they name
Heaven, Earhart embarks upon a different journey, toward self-
acceptance and understanding:
When I was very young, six or seven, I already wanted to
die. I already had the dream. I wanted to escape, to go
higher, to leave my body, and this made me seem ambitious,
greedy for life. When I was young, people hated my
greediness, but they enjoyed it too. A little girl
filled with desire is a beautiful sight, ugly, but very
beautiful...Sometimes I remember the life I used to live,
and it feels impossibly far away...Whether life is more
real than death, I don't know. What I know is that the
life I've lived since I died feels more real to me than
the one I lived before...Noonan once said any fool could
have seen I was risking my life but not living it.
Time, isolation, and the basic struggle to survive bring about an
inevitable-seeming love between Earhart and Noonan. When they believe
that their crashed Electra has been spotted by a plane, they prepare
the Electra for one final flight. Not knowing whether the plane that
appears to have spotted them is Japanese or American, they make the
decision to hold on to the life that they, and fate, have made for
themselves. As they make their way to the Electra, the revelation
becomes clear:
The navigator feels so alone at the thought of losing her.
The pleasure he takes in her, in being with her, is the
only pleasure he knows anymore...He realizes that without
doing anything he has fallen in love, beyond love, out of
love into life...In the jungle, in the dirty heat, he kisses
her, and she kisses him, and they lie down together. They
take each other on the floor of the jungle, and they know
now that there is no difference between being rescued and
being captured.
What could have been just an academic exercise in "what-ifs" becomes,
in Mendelsohn's capable hands, an arresting portrait of a life at last
lived to the fullest.
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