Under a Wing: A Memoir by Reeve Lindbergh

From the Publisher

"We Lindberghs still know ourselves best as a tribe: close-knit, self-enclosed, and self-defining, always prepared to be besieged by invisible forces upwelling from the past...."

The world knew Charles Lindbergh as a daring aviator, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and controversial isolationist in World War II.  His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was a bestselling author.  To their five children they were Father, never Daddy, and Mother.  Charles, a stern yet loving father, was surprisingly affectionate and playful; Anne provided a great, gentling love.  With remarkable candor, their youngest daughter provides a rare, intimate look at her legendary family...the pervasive impact of her brother's kidnapping and death...the complexity of her parents' long, loving marriage...the night her life and her mother's converged, as Reeve's own infant son died suddenly.  With grace and insight, Reeve Lindbergh appraises her remarkable parents, her unusual childhood, and the troubling questions that remain.  At once an eloquent reminiscence and a slice of American history, Under a Wing is, at its core, a heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary family.

Chicago Tribune Books - James Tobin

Superbly written.

Washington Post - Bob Thompson

Resonates with intimate detail. . .restoring the humanity behind the fame.

Publishers Weekly

Having already written about her family's life after Charles Lindbergh's death in the autobiographical novel The Names of the Mountains, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's youngest has written an evocative reminiscence of her youth in Darien, Conn., with her two famous parents. This gentle memoir shows a unique and uniquely poignant family life: "In our family it has always been hard to know what is right and what is wrong, in terms of what we can do for one another. It has been hard for us, too, to separate individual identity from family identity." The resulting publicity left their family with a fear of exposure. The author's father was always wary of what others could see--a cautiousness that extended to clothes, architecture and even the color of the family car. Although her father was constantly trying to shape and mold his children (no Wonder Bread, marshmallow fluff, grape jelly or candy was allowed at home and lectures and discussions were frequent), his widely perceived anti-Semitism ultimately hurt his family deeply. Anne Morrow Lindbergh emerges from this retrospective as a gentle, even ethereal, intellectual whose style was the polar opposite of her husband's. While the reader might like to know more about Reeve and her own family, instead, we are given an intimate look at other family members and at her parents' marriage. From an idyllic--if somewhat isolated--youth in Darien, to her father's death and her mother's mental deterioration, Reeve has watched and learned and shared with readers what she refers to as the living language of her parents' marriage. (Oct.)

Library Journal

This memoir by the youngest child of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh provides a rare look into the lives of a closely guarded famous family. Reeve Lindbergh, an author of young adult fiction, relates how she gradually came to realize that her parents were famous and how the events that made them famous affected all of their lives. Without sugar-coating her parents, especially her father, whose domineering personality was a source of almost constant frustration, she poignantly reminisces about how she could never live up to his expectations, how her parents handled the murder of their first son, and how she herself coped with the loss of a sister to cancer, her own son's death, and her mother's decline. A forthright and moving memoir; recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/98.]--Ronald Ray Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., KS

School Library Journal

YA-This beautifully written memoir allows readers to see the author's family as she knows them. She offers vivid descriptions of events, whether they be a flying lesson with her father, Charles Lindbergh, or the pain of watching the deteriorating health of her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The author speaks about the circumstances of her eldest brother's kidnapping and death as a baby and how that tragedy forever affected her parents and their interactions with their other children. Readers also meet other relatives, including maternal and paternal grandparents and cousins, and see what roles they played in the family's lives. Lindbergh shows that her family's relationships have not always been easy but they have been close and deep. She doesn't shy away from the truth and yet she manages to be honest without being hurtful. A truly wonderful portrait of a famous family.-Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Booknews

The youngest child of the famous aviator and the famous author recalls growing up a celebrity in a family that sought to avoid publicity. She discusses the impact of the notorious kidnapping of her oldest brother, how her mother encouraged and inspired the whole family to literary endeavor, her shock at hearing her father make antisemitic statements, and other experiences. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Susan Cheever

Marvelous, moving. . .the private story of a family whose members were as intimately linked with American history as they were with one another -- and the inner workings of one very human heart. -- USA Today

Bob Thompson

Resonates with intimate detail. . .restoring the humanity behind the fame. -- The Washington Post

James Tobin

Superbly written. -- Chicago Tribune Books

Kirkus Reviews

Published at almost the same time as A. Scott Berg's materful biography of Lindbergh, a sweetly moving memoir of growing up as the daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The novelist (The Names of the Mountains) is the youngest of five Lindbergh children, all born after the tragic kidnapping of the famous couple's first-born son. Few knew the Lindberghs had such a large family, and that was how the family wanted to keep it. To escape publicity, they moved frequently, finally settling in an old stone house in Connecticut, where Reeve grew up after WWII. Her father traveled habitually, consulting for government and industry, but was a devoted—if domineering—parent when home, exercising 'affection and discipline in equal measure, often at the same time.' Her mother was a quieter, less controlling presence; she wished to 'heal, soothe, and uplift us.' Although Reeve learned little of her kidnapped brother, eventually she too lost a son when he was not yet two years old. Her mother sat with her by the little boy's body, and together they mourned the lost babies. After Charles Lindbergh died nearly 25 years ago, Reeve sought to commune with him at his boyhood home in Little Falls, Minnesota, now a state park site. She reflected there on how to reconcile public and private images of famous parents, as well as on the man who taught his children that intolerance was 'repellent and unspeakable'—yet who himself wrote and uttered anti-Semitic statements. Anne Lindbergh, now in her 90s, suffering from the aftereffects of stroke, often doesn't recognize her daughter. Reeve writes about her mother's illness with sorrow, anger, humor, and acceptance. She also remembers hergrandmothers, her siblings—especially her sister, who died of cancer five years ago—and pleasant summers in Maine. An eloquent recollection of a happy childhood in a tightly knit family whose parents' celebrity complicated but did not contort their lives.

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Table of Contents

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Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One: Imagining the Lindberghs In kindergarten, one of my brothers told a friend on the playground that our father had discovered America. At about the same age, I dreamed that he was God. The relief brought by that revelation shone upon me the next morning like the bright rays of dawn. If our father was God, it explained everything: why we called him "Father," when all of our friends called their fathers "Daddy"; why he had so little contact with the other families around us, and yet so many people spoke about him with a kind of reverence; why we had to eat Pepperidge Farm bread at home rather than Wonder Bread; why the house shook when he was in a bad mood; and why I could find him in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I am the youngest child and second daughter of Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. My father, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, became internationally famous in May 1927 for making the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris, in a single-engine Ryan monoplane called the Spirit of St. Louis. He was twenty-five years old. My mother, Anne Morrow, met him in December of the following year when he made a goodwill trip to Mexico, where her father was serving as the American ambassador. She was twenty-two. They were married in 1929 and lived together for more than forty years until his death in 1974.

As fliers, my mother and father explored the world together, mapping air routes for the aviation industry in its infancy. As writers, they published many accounts of their adventures and their thoughts. His best-known volume was The Spirit of St. Louis, describing the 1927 flight. Hers was Gift from the Sea, a philosophical meditation on women's lives in this century.

When they were young parents, close to the beginning of their marriage, my father and mother suffered the death of their first child, Charles, as the result of a highly publicized kidnapping. My mother was pregnant at the time with her second son, my brother Jon. After Jon was born, my parents retreated from public life in order to raise him, and then the rest of their children, in protective privacy. They moved many times before I was born, seeking quiet and avoiding the press. They lived in England, in France, in Michigan, on Long Island, New York, and finally, just after the Second World War, bought the house in Darien, Connecticut, on the shores of Long Island Sound, where I grew up. Over the years they became so successful at this effort to remove their family from the public eye that many people are unaware that there were more Lindbergh children after that first, lost baby whose story was so well known, and whose brothers and sisters never knew him at all.

In fact, there were five of us: Jon, Land, Anne, Scott, and Reeve, three sons and two daughters. We grew up as the children of celebrities, but because our parents worked so hard to remove themselves from celebrity life, our understanding of what that meant was fluid and imperfect. It remains uncertain and idiosyncratic even today. We Lindberghs still know ourselves best as a tribe: close-knit, self-enclosed, and self-defining, always prepared to be besieged by invisible forces upwelling from the past: the famous flight, the kidnapping, the controversy over our father's isolationist stance just before the Second World War.

Although it is now more than twenty years since he died, we are still directed and dominated by our father's strength of character. Although she is more than ninety years old, often confused in her mind, and in fragile health at this writing, we are still redeemed, gentled, and sustained by our mother.

"Was I married?" she will ask me, her eyes wide with astonishment at the thought. Or, "Are you my sister?" But when my own sister, her other daughter, Anne, was dying, and I could do nothing to help Anne, could not stop the process, I put my arms around our mother and cried because I thought my heart was breaking, and also because I thought that she, my greatest comfort all my life, was now too disoriented even to understand what was going on. But my mother embraced me in return, and she wept, too, in her flannel nightgown with the pink rosebuds on it, and she patted my head and then said exactly the right thing.

"You never did anything wrong, Reeve. You never did anything wrong."

In our family it has always been hard to know what is right and what is wrong, in terms of what we can do for one another. It has been hard for us, too, to separate individual identity from family identity. As the youngest, I imagined growing up by virtue of a succession of transformations, becoming first one member of my family and then another until I had been handed benevolently all the way up the line into adulthood. By the time I was twelve I would have my brother Scott's forgetfulness, his bashful grace, and his ability to befriend snakes and turtles. At fifteen I would be Anne, with straight blond hair and a blue-and-white-checked bikini, small-featured and arrestingly lovely to look at, playing her flute with fingertips faintly scented by the oranges that came to us in crates from Florida once a month, which Anne peeled and ate, one after another, all day long. Later on I would be Land, a cowboy and a cattleman, and then Jon, with mask and tanks and flippers, exploring the sea.