I loved this little book. It captures people and places in a manner that is intense,
gentle, and vivid all at once. Jane Mendelsohn's lyrical prose moves back and forth from
present to past, from first to third person; and she creates from a non-fictional
situation, a fictional flight that is unforgettable. —Cathryn Pisarski, Editor
of Cune Magazine.The story of aviatrix Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan and the
vogage that took them away from, not around, the world.
Chapter Three of I Was Amelia Earhart begins,
It was a demented trip. 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. In spite of the hazardous conditions, or perhaps
because of them, Noonan drank and I flew with reckless, melodramatic abandon, and as the
voyage progressed we carelessly flung overboard any pretense of civility. Much later, when
I looked back on the flight, it seemed to me that we had been two lost souls in an immense
netherworld, traveling toward an arbitrary goal, wondering which of us was more forsaken:
the navigator who didn’t care where we were going, or the pilot who didn’t care
if we ever got there.
We must have both known that we shared something, a secret craving for
oblivion. But there is no such thing as oblivion. Oblivion is a lie.
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