I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn

From the Publisher

In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.

There is her love affair with flying ("The sky is flesh") . . . .

There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine ("Heroines did what they wanted") . . . her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out before Christmas.

There is the flight itself -- day after magnificent or perilous or exhilarating or terrifying day ("Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it").

And there is, miraculously, an island ("We named it Heaven, as a kind of joke").

And, most important, there is Noonan . . .

Katherine Whittamore

"Hubris and liquor" made Amelia Earhart crash, according to Jane Mendelsohn, her literary channeler in I Was Amelia Earhart. "The more he (her navigator, Fred Noonan) drank, the more reckless she became, the more he drank." If you don't mind riding on thermals of speculation without a glider of fact, you'll love this novel, which purports to tell the story of Earhart and Noonan after their plane goes down. If you do mind, I Was Amelia Earhart will feel indulgent and bothersome until about page 46, when the imaginative loop-de-loops arch into something higher than sheer style: "We saw the same sights and felt the same breezes," writes Mendelsohn of Earhart and Noonan, pre-flameout. "We watched the same moon dip in and out of the same clouds. We felt the same rain and heard the same silences. It was like sharing a dream with someone else."

We learn of Earhart's little-loved husband G.P. Putnam, with his "studied New York charm," and her failed inventor father. We read the telegram from the Roosevelts. We appreciate, if never warm to, the aviatrix's uncompromising personality; "I have not one self-sacrificing, maternal bone in my unwomanly, muscular body," as she says. But she loves her plane, "a barge of beaten silver," with its cruddy radio and bamboo fishing pole, along which messages were sent from tail to cockpit. We hear about the month-long trip across the world, most nights spent sleeping in hangars "on rancid cots, with sinister stains."

But all this is preparation for part two of the book, where the pair ends up, yessir, on a desert island. "TV movie," one groans, but this is where Mendelsohn's flights of fancy spiral the highest. The book now becomes a great read. Earhart and Noonan move from hope of rescue to bickering, hatred, and madness; to love and then to fear of rescue, against a backdrop of coconut palms, "slate-colored sharks," heatwaves so bad Noonan's skin bleeds, monsoons where the "clouds turned purple, bruising before our eyes," and sweaty lovemaking. He does the fishing and she builds the fires, as well as "replicas of the Hoover Dam, the Eiffel Tower, and then, when she is at her most despairing, a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge."

It sounds like a cloying montage, but it isn't. Both realize that the booze and the flying were more escapes from life than runs at transcendence; by deplaning from the world of publicists and reporters and expected behaviors, they get their lives back. "Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it," as Earhart/Mendelsohn says. A year past the crash, after a supper of shark fin soup, the two go for a swim in the lagoon, "where they were both struck at the same moment with the realization that they had never been so happy." You may not feel quite the same way -- the prose is lovely, but completely humorless -- yet the book does spirit you aloft. It brings Amelia Earhart to life, more than any straight biography ever could. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Past and present, fact and fiction, first-person and third blend into a life of the celebrated aviatrix-both before and after her famed disappearance in 1937, at age 39-that unfolds with the surreal precision of a dream and that marks first novelist Mendelsohn as a writer to watch. "The sky is flesh," begins the first of the scores of discrete vignettes and reflections that make up the narrative, an apt start to a story drenched in sensuality and the pursuit of it. The Earhart limned here is materialistic, glory-seeking, sexually hungry, outrageously self-absorbed and utterly charismatic. Telling her tale with ruthless honesty in both her own voice and that of the self she sees "from far away... ghostly, aerial," she speaks of her days as America's sweetheart, as the wife of publisher G.P. Putnam. Diverting from the historical record, she also speaks of the years after she and her navigator, Frederick J. Noonan, "a drunk," crash-land on a South Sea island that they name "Heaven, as a kind of joke," but that becomes a decent approximation as the years slip by and the castaways discover happiness in nature and in each other's arms. When rescue seems eminent, Earhart and Noonan take to the air one last time, and crash one last time, perhaps into eternity but in any case into an existence defined by not by control but by "abandonment"-a message in keeping with the story's theme but in fact an ironic one for a novel as calculatedly lovely and moving as this one. (Apr.)

Library Journal

This first novel treats an enduring modern mystery: what happened to Amelia Earhart, the celebrity aviator who vanished in 1937 while piloting her Lockheed Electra around the world? Amelia reveals her fate in a memoir written in her pilot's log after an emergency landing on a remote Pacific island. At first hopeful of rescue, Amelia and navigator Fred Noonan gradually realize that their old lives are gone. As they use the island's limited resources to create sustenance and shelter, their former animosities wear away, and in time they find a kind of love together. Amelia's fictional voice is dreamlike yet convincing, moving between first and third person, in and out of memories, always mourning the loss of the sky. The book's stylized narration may not engage every historical fiction fan, but readers of aviation history or speculative fiction will find much to interest them here.-Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.

School Library Journal

YA-This short fictional account seeks to answer the question, "What happened to Amelia Earhart?" Shifting between a first- and third-person narrative, the well-crafted tale draws readers into the personalities of both the aviatrix and her navigator, Fred Noonan, both of whom disappeared on a round-the-world record-making flight in 1937 somewhere near New Guinea. Mendelsohn imagines what might have happened if the plane had landed on an island rather than disappearing into the ocean. Using only a few authentic words credited to the pilot, the author creates a novel that might have been written in Earhart's log for future generations to discover. A flashback reveals the woman's earlier life and the events leading up to the tragic leg of the final flight. The love-hate relationship between Earhart and her husband and manager, G.P. Putnam, is sufficiently sketched to help explain why she was flying in such poor weather with a useless radio and a drunken navigator as her only guide. Survival on the island they name "Heaven" is Earhart and Noonan's single goal. There is the need for food, shelter, water, and finally companionship. Day after day moves on, altering both the characters themselves and forcing them to face their fate together. This is a fast-paced survival story, a tale of relationships, and a mythical account of what might have been. Altogether a great read.Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

Michiko Kakutani

A terrific meditation on freedom and love in flight, it stands on its own as a powerfully imagined work of fiction...Ms. Mendelsohn invests her story with force of fable. -- The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

First-novelist Mendelsohn gives us Amelia Earhart's fictive autobiography, written as a message in a bottle from the desert island on which she spent her last days.

We're kept pretty close to the facts here for most of the story: Earhart's flying, her marriage to New York publisher G.P. Putnam, her ambiguous sexuality, and her celebrity as a public figure are all components of this putative memoir, which proceeds as a straightforward recollection of the past. The central narrative event is the planning and execution of Earhart's final around-the-world flight, presented here mostly as a publicity stunt gone awry. "After I flew across the Atlantic and became famous, G.P. decided to mold me into a star." And how: Once Putnam became Earhart's husband and manager, every aspect of her career was choreographed for maximum public exposure. Flight logs were written for publication, press conferences and radio communications were recorded for the archives, and itineraries were chosen with a view toward public titillation. On a crucial leg of the final flight in 1937, however, Putnam's skill as a showman becomes Earhart's undoing when the tiny Pacific island where she was meant to make a daring stopover can't be located, forcing her to ditch on an even smaller desert atoll where she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, are out of radio range and cut off from the rest of the world. The later, Robinson Crusoe-like portions of Earhart's account are written under the heavy weight of her solitude, and the inevitable affair with Noonan does little to relieve the intensity of the fear and nostalgia that color the account toward the close. The melancholy tone of the opening is completed splendidly in the flat stoicism of the end.

Strange, slight, but wonderful: a modest portrait that manages to create some moments of exceptional intensity and power of feeling.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

1. The novel's opening phrase-"the sky is flesh"-is repeated several times in the course of the story. What are some of the meanings that are evoked by this unusual statement? Do these meanings change, for you, as the novel progresses? In what other ways are images and descriptions of the sky used to convey feelings or states of mind?

2. The verb in the book's title is in the past tense, while the declarative statement indicates the continued presence of the speaker. On the first page of the novel's prologue, Amelia Earhart speaks of "now, " referring to "the life I've lived since I died." How does the novel play with the concept of time? How are the conventional categories of past, present, and future relevant? And to what uses does Jane Mendelsohn put them?

3. The novel alternates between third and first-person narration. The author has Amelia Earhart give us a reason for this stylistic choice on page 10, and elsewhere Jane Mendelsohn has said, "Maybe this sounds too mystical, but Earhart was showing me how to tell her story: I think she would have liked it" [from an interview with Joanne Kaufman, People, 6/17/96]. What is the effect of this alternating narrative voice upon the emerging portrait of Amelia Earhart? What is its effect upon your experience of the story?

4. The author seems to emphasize a second and equally important meaning of the word flight-that which has to do with fleeing, escape, or escapism. Amelia Earhart tells us on page 41 that she and Noonan share "a secret craving for oblivion." What are the differences, if any, between Earhart's obsession with flight and Noonan's addiction to drink? Why does Earhart conclude that "there is no such thingas oblivion. Oblivion is a lie"?

5. Consider Amelia's conversation with Owen, the reporter, on pages 34 to 37, in which the alarmingly negligent, even foolhardy aspects of the flight are discussed. Does Mendelsohn want us to conclude that Earhart had a death wish? Or that she was giving in to fate, or releasing control of her life, out of weariness, boredom, or some other reason? What might have provoked her to take such unnecessary risks?

6. Take a look at the following dense, lyrical passage: "The entire journey, flying as fast as possible like fugitive angels, took more than a month, during which time we spent our days feverish from the flaming sun or lost in the artillery of monsoon rains and almost always astonished by the unearthly architecture of the sky" [p. 39]. Also read the brilliant description of the plane's descent, on page 58. How would you describe the style of the writing? What aspects-word choice, image, rhythm-are particularly striking?

7. Earhart's last flight, like many others she made, was attempted in pursuit of a world record and for the sake of publicity. Her husband was promoting the book she would produce about her trip around the world (and after her disappearance he did publish a book in her name, Last Flight, from her notebooks and log reports). Is this book an imaginative effort to right the wrongs that Earhart suffered at the hands of her ambitious husband? How can a novelized "biography" such as this one revise our understanding of a historical figure?

8. Consider the scene at the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon on pages 49 to 51. Why is Amelia so irritated by Noonan? What is the source of the conflict between them? How does this scene, along with the passage on pages 59 to 60, illuminate the character of each? Is their eventual love affair believable? Given their situation, is it inevitable?

9. How do you understand Amelia's relationship to her Electra? How do you interpret the intensity of her desire to be in the plane, to be in the air? What happens on her "midnight voyages" [p. 81]? What does this novel tell us about solitude, our craving for it, and what Robert Frost called the "desert places" within ourselves?

10. The silk scarf and the compact mirror are important elements in our understanding of the appearance Amelia Earhart wishes to present to the world, even when she has just ditched her plane on a deserted island [p. 74]. Why did she depend so heavily upon her looks and her sense of style? Do you think people would be so fascinated with her if she were not so beautiful? Why does she eventually throw the mirror into the sea?

11. "It was as if what she had considered to be her self all these years was only a magnified detail of an enormous painting whose entire composition and narrative she had never before known existed, let alone seen" [p. 114]. How does life "after death"-life on the island-change how Amelia experiences herself? What does she mean by saying, on page 138, "I had been risking my life without living it"? Does this insight render her heroic exploits meaningless?

12. Part Three of the novel begins with an epigraph from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. How does this epigraph help you understand the lovers' final flight from rescue? What light does it shed on your reading of the book as a whole?

13. This book deals in large degree with romance, fantasy, and wish fulfillment. What do you find most romantic about it? Do you leave the novel wishing that Amelia Earhart did survive her last flight? That she had another, different life after her life of fame?

14. Amelia Earhart is recognized as one of the great heroines of the twentieth century. How does this novel affect your sense of her heroic stature?

15. Jane Mendelsohn has remarked that "flying is a lot like writing. The solitude, the adventure and the physical aspect of it. Sitting in front of the computer I sort of felt like I was in the cockpit. And there's the element of the unknown: the blank page and the empty sky" [interview, People, 6/17/96]. In what ways is flying a metaphor for the imagination? Why is Amelia Earhart a particularly good subject for an experiment in imagination?

Read an Excerpt