I Was Amelia Earhart

Lately, I've been engrossing myself in the beautiful prose of Jane Mendelsohn in her book I Was Amelia Earhart.  It is a "brilliantly imagined," fictional account of what happened to Amelia Earhart when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937, never to be seen again.

I need to return this book soon, and I want to be able to read these words again as I want.  So, I propose that perhaps they are beautiful enough to be worth sharing with the greater public here  while I can simultaneously store excerpts from the text for my later access.  I will break excerpts into several postings....  I hope you enjoy the narrative....


Excerpts from I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn.....

So, the sky.
It's the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.
I am flying around the world, there's nothing but sky.  The sky is flesh.  It's the last sky. (4)


Sometimes my thoughts are clearly mine, I hear them speak to me, in my own voice.  Other times I see myself from far away, and my thoughts are ghostly, aerial, in the third person.

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. (10)


It went very quickly, those first few days.  They got out of the plane, and together they looked around and tried to make sense of their surroundings.  Then all of a sudden, as if part of the choreography of a dream, they set about performing the necessary rituals of survival. (62)


This is how we talk to each other now, in overlapping monologues.  We've been separated by fear.  Fear has set in, and memory, and blame.  I'm awake most of the night, waiting for a ship to see our fire, hearing in the wind the radio operator, hearing the scratch of his breath in the shifting leaves, comforting myself in my anguish with memory traces, the agonizing moments before I lost contact with the world. (74).


We couldn't have foreseen what would happen to us as a result of witnessing our own abandonment.  It seemed impossible that the plane hadn't seen us, but equally impossible that it had and then just flew away.  We never understood the meaning of the plane.  It abandoned us. It was too terrible to believe, that our only hope, our one salvation, that the messenger we had been waiting for, the protection we had expected, was out there, it existed, but not for us.  So at first we did not lose hope.  We did not even worry.  But gradually, in the hours and days to come, our hope abandoned us too, and all that was left was the memory of that plane.  Like children, we adored the plane that abandoned us.  We sat on the beach for a long time, waiting, cultivating our separate vivid images of the plane.  We loved the plane even more after it left us, as if that might bring it back. (81)


We didn't speak to each other for a long time.  We were angry and we blamed our anger on each other. There were no more planes, no ships on the horizon.  At first we kept track of the dates, counting the days, and then we stopped doing even that.
      It lasted a long time, and then finally we couldn't be angry anymore.  We abandoned hope, then worry, and then even our anger.  It was easy: we never tried to do it, we just did, finally, because we had no choice.  (82)