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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 . . .

From the Inside Flap

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 . . .

From the Back Cover

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 . . .

About the Author

Jane Mendelsohn was born in New York City, July 4, 1965. She was graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale University in 1987, and attended Yale Law School for one year before beginning a career as a writer/journalist.

In 1992, Ms. Mendelsohn spotted an article in The New York Times about the discovery of a piece of a plane believed to have been Amelia Earhart's. The article mentioned that Earhart traveled with a navigator, Fred Noonan, who was with her on her last flight. Intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of two people flying around the world together, crashing, and perhaps surviving, she began researching Earhart's life and disappearance. Shortly after, Ms. Mendelsohn began sketching out a book based on her findings. The first version was a much longer book, told entirely in the third person. "Once I finished it," Ms. Mendelsohn says, "I realized that I had only just figured out the story. Now that I knew what had happened, I had to tell it in Earhart's, and my, voice." The result is I Was Amelia Earhart.

Harper's Bazaar hails I Was Amelia Earhart as "an immediately addicting book, as telegraphic as those of Margaret Duras, and as charged with longing....not to be missed." The New York Times writes, "Ms. Mendelsohn has chosen to use the bare-boned outlines of the aviator's life as an armature for a poetic meditation on freedom and love and flight. I Was Amelia Earhart, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's General in His Labyrinth, invokes the spirit of a mythic personage, while standing on its own as a powerfully imagined work of fiction." I Was Amelia Earhart is Ms. Mendelsohn's first book and novel.

Ms. Mendelsohn's reviews have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Village Voice, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and Yale Review. She has worked as an assistant to the literary editor at The Village Voice and as a tutor at Yale University. At the moment, Ms. Mendelsohn is writing a horror film. She is also sketching out details for her next novel.

Ms. Mendelsohn is married and lives in New York with her husband, filmmaker Nick Davis.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I WAS AMELIA EARHART

The sky is flesh.

The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It's a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.

More and more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away. It's always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn't seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don't know. What I know is that the life I've live since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before.

I know this: I risked my life without living it. Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it. I had already been flying for a long time when he said that. It was 1937. I was thirty-nine. I was more beautiful than ever, but an aura of unhappiness traveled with me, like the trail of a falling comet. I felt as though I had already lived my entire life, having flown the Atlantic and set several world records, and there was no one to share my sadness with, least of all my husband. Charmed by my style and my daring exploits, the public continued to send me flowers and gifts, but the love of strangers meant nothing to me. My luminous existence left me longing and bored. I had no idea what it meant to live an entire life. I was still very young.

So, the sky.

It's the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.

I'm flying around the world, there's nothing but sky. The sky is flesh. It's the last sky.

I remember: I'm flying around the world, I'm flying over the Pacific somewhere of the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I'm lost. I watch the sky as it curves and swells, and every now and then I think I can see it shudder. Voluptuous, sultry in the naked heat, it seems to me to be the flesh of a woman. But then suddenly the light illuminates a stretch of more masculine proportions -- a muscular passage of azure heft, a wide plank like the back of a hand -- and I have to acknowledge, although I hate to admit it, the bisexuality of nature. I purse my lips a little when I realize this, and scrunch my nose up to rearrange my goggles. My eyes and my eyes reflected in the windshield hold the sun in them, and it burns. I blink and reach one arm directly overhead. My fingers grasp a dial. Out of the far corner of my field of vision, I catch a glimpse of the underlying sea. Thinking to myself that this might be the last day of my life, that I'm hot, and that I am hungry, I adjust the dial and lower my arm. The sea is dark. It is darker than the sky.

This is the story of what happened to me when I died. It's also the story of my life. Destiny, the alchemy of fate and luck. I think about it sometimes, under a radiant sun. The tide laughs. The light swims. I watch the fish-skeleton shadows of the palm leaves on the sand. The clouds ripped to shreds.

Today when I think of my former life, I think of it as a dream. In the dream I am another person. In the dream I am the most famous aviatrix of my day, a heroine. I am Amelia Earhart.

Review:

4.2 out of 5

83.64% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Not just a "little book"

M.F. · August 27, 2009

I had read "I Was Amelia Earhart" well over ten years ago and always counted it as one of my favorite books. After seeing an Amelia Earhart special on NatGeo channel recently, one that covered all the speculations about what happened to her, I realized I missed the little book! Not finding it on my bookshelves (obviously not returned by the last person I'd loaned it to), I headed to Bolo.com and was so glad to find some used copies in good shape--practically perfect shape, in fact. The style is enchanting, switching without the reader's notice between first and third person and the detail is true to the imagination of a person wondering about her end. It IS a little book...about vertical postcard size and just over 130 pages...but not little in its effect. I highly recommend this book.

4.0 out of 5 stars Fly Me To The Moon

G. · October 12, 2012

Author Mendelsohn probably didn't need to add the name Earhart after Amelia since anyone older than 30 probably can't think of anyone else named Amelia. Like Lindbergh there was only one. And in our mind's eye she is forever 39, classy, slender, athletic, good looking with a "kiss my butt" attitude and the guts of a burglar.She knew from young she would be a heroine and didn't suffer the faint of heart. When the word went out across what passed as the media in 1939 that her plane was missing millions of just plain folks held their collective breaths. It is not a spoiler to say that she slipped out of the firmament that day in 1939 into that historical status of one of the great enigmas of the twentieth century. As far as we know Amelia and her plane have never been seen again.It goes without saying that theories surrounding her disappearance are as common as dust. As time dragged on and we plunged into WWII one of the favorites was that she was taken prisoner with all that entails. Others believed she was stranded some where on a desert island. Searches for her remains and that of her plane continue to this day as the clock and calendar stride inexorably onward toward 75 years since that faithful day.But this book is only marginally about that. The build up to the day she flew off to conquer the world is told in little vignettes from her personal life. We are treated in this fictional version of a part of her life to the occasional doubts and depression that invaded her veneer. We meet her husband and promoter George P. Putnam. We are introduced to her navigator Fred Noonan who is portrayed as a hopeless if not hopeful alcoholic. He is competent and talented but with his looks, personality and propensity for the sauce this hail fellow was usually pretty much worthless first thing in the morning. With this companion and a compromised communication system Amelia set off to circumnavigate the globe equatorially in her beloved Lockheed Electra 10E.In the second half of this novel Jane Mendelsohn recounts the time following their disappearance. It is told to us in Earhart's own words with occasional narration. Amelia Earhart was an accomplished and successful writer and was the Aviation Editor for Cosmopolitan. The log book which Amelia kept during the time after her exit from our world reflects her introspective self analysis and evolution of her understanding of relationships not only between humans but with the rest of nature and the cosmos. Both she and Noonan go through a bit of metamorphosis and become by turns estranged and close. The author does not over embellish but the writing is nearly poetry. My favorite line is As they flew into oblivion "... 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."No conclusions, no wrapping up, no great mystery solved; a good companionable read that puts you right there on the beach. I'll say no more. Short and sweet. 3* GIBO

5.0 out of 5 stars intriguing book

D. · March 14, 2015

Well, this was an interesting book and one I enjoyed. Wish I could write like this lady.Will read again.

3.0 out of 5 stars 2012 Westport Reads Choice

K.R.M. · January 5, 2012

Our local library selected this book as the choice for Westport Reads, a community month-long event during which the entire town is supposed to read the same book. I understand why they chose this book as certainly the questions of how we live are paramount to the book. The author imagines Amelia Earhart's life both future and past from the perspective (mostly) of Earhart if she had survived and landed on an atoll or small island with her navigator. The two find peace that neither had achieved within the context of their normal lives and the text asks the question,"What is paradise to you?" As most of us know, it's not what we might expect. Thus, the book was a good choice for starting conversations throughout a town. Historical fiction is tricky, because the author imposes insight onto not entirely fictitious characters as they are based on individuals who actually existed and had their own experiences, consequences and systems of belief. It's pleasant to consider alternate existences and that's what fiction is all about. But, historical fiction can be tricky. The author maintains Amelia's voice and makes a believable argument towards catharsis. I struggle more with the genre in general than with her approach. It's entirely fair to imagine, "what if..." and a well-known historical figure such as Earhart inspires curiosity.

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely read

S. · February 14, 2024

I read this book many years ago and recently found it again at a used bookstore. I picked it up and reread and remembered how much I enjoyed the idea of what her life might have been like. Short, easy memorable read.

4.0 out of 5 stars I Was Amelia Earhart

J.E.S. · July 7, 2011

Amelia Earhart was married in her sister's home not far from where I live and I saw her signiture on an old register when I visited the Narragansett Hotel on Block Island, R.I.several years ago.The book was interesting from the respect that recent evidence seems to further the theory that Amelia and her navigator landed on Howland Island and died there. The novel softens the blow of the thinking that they suffered a violent death when their plane ran out of gas and plunged into the Pacific ocean.A good read and I highly recommend to people who still wonder and speculate about Amelia's fate.

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother.

W.D. · May 7, 2016

Fairy Tale. Rather Predictable.

A story of flight, courage, romance and beauty.

M.R.D. · December 5, 1999

This is a wonderful book, at once lyrical, romantic and true. Taking as its starting point the life and disappearance of America`s most famous and most glamorous aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, it steers a passionate and fantastical course imagining the outcome of Amelia`s infamous final flight into oblivion in her twin-engined Lockheed Electra. Without straying into sentimentality Ms Mendelsohn uses her purposeful and expressive prose to examine our relationship with the land, sea and sky through a heroine of extraordinary courage, charisma and beauty. In doing so she has written a book of immense warmth which sparkles like the sun reflecting on a airplane headed for the unknown.

Short and sweet magical realism

P. · August 5, 2019

A short and interesting novel which merges historical detail with speculation as to what happened when Amelia Earhart disappeared in the Pacific. From the fantastical to the concrete, beautifully written and never outstays its welcome.

Perfect Novella

J.K. · November 8, 2012

This is a favorite read, beautifully written, a simple tale of a woman who flew, the characters around her. Some fact some fiction, some artistic licence. I recommend it to anyone who just likes a great story.

Good book

T.M. · August 6, 2014

I am still reading this book at the moment. But i am finding it difficult who is saying what as there are no quotation marks. Other than that i cant find a fault in this lovely written book about amelia earhart life

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I Was Amelia Earhart

Name: I Was Amelia Earhart
Brand: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SKU: U0679776362
Price: 9.82 BHD
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Rating: 4 (11 reviews)

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