I Was Amelia Earhart [Paperback]

Jane Mendelsohn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 1997

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 . . .

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In an evocative and imaginative novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one windy day in 1937. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (March 4, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679776362
• ISBN-13: 978-0679776369
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #306,379 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving, inspiring, and very funny, August 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: I Was Amelia Earhart (Paperback)

I came to this book full of the skepticism of someone who is sick of the media's deciding 'this is the book,' or 'this is the movie of the year.' What a surprise, therefore, to find that this book is not as good as they said -- it's BETTER. A compelling hybrid of Hemingway, Garcia Marquez, and Virgina Woolf, Mendelsohn really does deserve the praise she earned for this book -- and more. The mainstream press seems to have picked up on the Don Imus aspect of the success of the book -- and ignored the fact that it's beautifully, and brilliantly, written. And almost no one picked up on the book's exquisite irony, its dry wit, its utterly deadpan sense of humor. A really invigorating read, it makes me want to go back to college to take a course and discuss it further. It's that good. Of course the book's success may actually have hurt it in some ways (as some of the almost spiteful comments here indicate), made people fail to see the book on its own merits, but I have a feeling that her next book will more clearly establish Mendelsohn for what she is -- the writer of her generation -- and show that she is anything but a 'one-hit wonder.'

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The magic of flying and being human..., March 4, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Was Amelia Earhart (Hardcover)

This is not the greatest novel ever written, nor does it ever pretend to be. However, it has been one of the very few contemporary stories that flirts with originality and exploits imagination.

I read this book on a long, long direct flight from New York to Tokyo a few months ago. Perhaps the way I read this book had alot to do with its impact on me. Had I read it on the ground I would have surely perceived it differently. I have always loved airplanes, I have always been in love with something and I have always, always (don't quite know why or how) been fascinated by the disappearance of this remarkable woman.

So take it on your next long flight. Pick a window seat and enjoy it. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in aviation, the vagueries of love and Amelia Earhart. I do not really see it as a novel, but it very well may be a profoundly eloquent, lengthy and enduring poem. One of the best in my recent memory.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I Was Amelia Earhart, August 30, 2001

By 

evelyn fox (hillsdale, nj USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Was Amelia Earhart (Paperback)

Surely one wonders of the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart after her aircraft disappeared several decades ago. If one is curious about her life, read one of the biographies; If one is open to intrigue by fictional possibilities, Ms. Mendelsohn deserves an A+ for originality. Themes such as illusion and reality, the eternity of the soul, flirtation with death, escapism, living in the moment, and Eden, are blended with romance, surrealiwm and exquisite visuals. I Was Amelia Earhart is an intriguing contemporay novel and I look foward to more from this author.