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Flyover Lives: A Memoir
From the New York Times bestselling author of Le Divorce, a dazzling meditation on the mysteries of the "wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us
Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi and off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her: Indifference to history—that’s why you Americans seem so naïve and don’t really know where you’re from.”
The j’accuse stayed with Johnson. Were Americans indifferent to history? Her own family seemed always to have been in the Midwest. Surely they had got there from somewhere? In digging around, she discovers letters and memoirs written by generations of stalwart pioneer ancestors that testify to more complex times than the derisive nickname "The Flyover" gives the region credit for.
With the acuity and sympathy that her novels are known for, she captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention. This spellbinding memoir will appeal to fans of Bill Bryson, Patricia Hampl, and Annie Dillard.
Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi and off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her: Indifference to history—that’s why you Americans seem so naïve and don’t really know where you’re from.”
The j’accuse stayed with Johnson. Were Americans indifferent to history? Her own family seemed always to have been in the Midwest. Surely they had got there from somewhere? In digging around, she discovers letters and memoirs written by generations of stalwart pioneer ancestors that testify to more complex times than the derisive nickname "The Flyover" gives the region credit for.
With the acuity and sympathy that her novels are known for, she captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention. This spellbinding memoir will appeal to fans of Bill Bryson, Patricia Hampl, and Annie Dillard.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 14, 2014
26 people are currently reading
1144 people want to read
About the author
Diane Johnson
129 books186 followersDiane Johnson is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living in contemporary France. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988.
In addition to her literary works, she is also known for writing the screenplay of the 1980 film The Shining together with its director and producer Stanley Kubrick.
In addition to her literary works, she is also known for writing the screenplay of the 1980 film The Shining together with its director and producer Stanley Kubrick.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 127 reviews
October 25, 2014
This was a charming memoir, even though it rambled in parts. But even the rambling parts were rather interesting.
Diane Johnson grew up in Moline, Illinois, which is part of the Midwest, which has been derisively called "flyover country" by those who live in big cities on the coasts. I was keen to read this book because I grew up in Iowa, which is next door to Illinois, and indeed, many of Diane's stories were similar to my experiences there, even though there is a 40-year difference in our ages. Much of the Midwest is not very changeable, you see.
"I had always wondered how the first settlers in Illinois, in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, survived the ruthless climate and isolation, how they managed to clear the tough woodlands to make their farms, how they taught their kids something about Shakespeare and Mozart, and eventually pitched in for a war like the Civil War though they'd barely seen a black person or encountered a slave. No one writes much about the center part of our country, sometimes called the Flyover, or about the modest pioneers who cleared and peopled this region. Yet their midwestern stories tell us a lot about American history. Migration patterns, wars, the larger movements, are after all made up of individual human beings experiencing and sometimes recording their lives."
Diane was one of those restless kids who dreamed of traveling and moving away from her small town, and eventually she did. At the beginning of the book she is living in France, and while at a house party, a French friend tells her that "Americans are naive and indifferent to history."
This quote bothers Diane to the point where she spends months researching her ancestors, going through family heirlooms and diaries, and ends up writing a book about them. (So take that, you obnoxious woman!)
"I became especially interested in some testimonies by long-departed great-grandmothers, simple stories but all the rarer because the lives of prairie women have usually been lost. Perhaps prairie women at the end of the eighteenth century didn't have the leisure to pick up their pens, or maybe they didn't think their lives were of interest."
Most of the history Diane dug up involves her great-great-great grandmother Catharine Martin (born in 1800), who took time to write a hundred pages about her life when she was in her 70s.
The prose in Diane's memoir is lovely, and I flagged numerous passages while I was reading. My only complaint was that some of the chapters jumped around in time and perspective, which was a bit jarring. Some pieces felt like they should have been magazine articles or essays, but got shoved in this book wily-nily. For example, there is an interesting section about Diane's experiences with writing screenplays and working with movie directors, including Stanley Kubrick, Merchant Ivory and Mike Nichols, but the placement seemed random. And some of the chapters were so short that they felt like afterthoughts.
Overall, this was a very enjoyable read, and I appreciated the historical details about Midwestern life in the 1800s, and also Diane's stories about growing up in the 1940s. Before this memoir, I had only read one of Diane's novels (Le Divorce), but I liked this so much that I think I'll look up her other books.
Favorite Quote:
"As a little girl in Moline, I didn't expect to be a writer, because I didn't know a writer was something you could be; I had no sense that books were still being written."
My rating: 3.5 stars rounded up to 4
Diane Johnson grew up in Moline, Illinois, which is part of the Midwest, which has been derisively called "flyover country" by those who live in big cities on the coasts. I was keen to read this book because I grew up in Iowa, which is next door to Illinois, and indeed, many of Diane's stories were similar to my experiences there, even though there is a 40-year difference in our ages. Much of the Midwest is not very changeable, you see.
"I had always wondered how the first settlers in Illinois, in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, survived the ruthless climate and isolation, how they managed to clear the tough woodlands to make their farms, how they taught their kids something about Shakespeare and Mozart, and eventually pitched in for a war like the Civil War though they'd barely seen a black person or encountered a slave. No one writes much about the center part of our country, sometimes called the Flyover, or about the modest pioneers who cleared and peopled this region. Yet their midwestern stories tell us a lot about American history. Migration patterns, wars, the larger movements, are after all made up of individual human beings experiencing and sometimes recording their lives."
Diane was one of those restless kids who dreamed of traveling and moving away from her small town, and eventually she did. At the beginning of the book she is living in France, and while at a house party, a French friend tells her that "Americans are naive and indifferent to history."
This quote bothers Diane to the point where she spends months researching her ancestors, going through family heirlooms and diaries, and ends up writing a book about them. (So take that, you obnoxious woman!)
"I became especially interested in some testimonies by long-departed great-grandmothers, simple stories but all the rarer because the lives of prairie women have usually been lost. Perhaps prairie women at the end of the eighteenth century didn't have the leisure to pick up their pens, or maybe they didn't think their lives were of interest."
Most of the history Diane dug up involves her great-great-great grandmother Catharine Martin (born in 1800), who took time to write a hundred pages about her life when she was in her 70s.
The prose in Diane's memoir is lovely, and I flagged numerous passages while I was reading. My only complaint was that some of the chapters jumped around in time and perspective, which was a bit jarring. Some pieces felt like they should have been magazine articles or essays, but got shoved in this book wily-nily. For example, there is an interesting section about Diane's experiences with writing screenplays and working with movie directors, including Stanley Kubrick, Merchant Ivory and Mike Nichols, but the placement seemed random. And some of the chapters were so short that they felt like afterthoughts.
Overall, this was a very enjoyable read, and I appreciated the historical details about Midwestern life in the 1800s, and also Diane's stories about growing up in the 1940s. Before this memoir, I had only read one of Diane's novels (Le Divorce), but I liked this so much that I think I'll look up her other books.
Favorite Quote:
"As a little girl in Moline, I didn't expect to be a writer, because I didn't know a writer was something you could be; I had no sense that books were still being written."
My rating: 3.5 stars rounded up to 4
February 10, 2014
First, I received this Advanced Readers Copy from Goodreads and Viking.
I didn't want to do this, but I can't stand injustice, and I believe this book has been unfairly reviewed on here.
Before my review, I want to rebut some of the other reviews I've seen. I feel like if you can give a well-respected and brilliant writer only 1 star for their life story, you can handle a rebuttal:
1. "The book's premise and title were misleading." Uh, I don't know how many times she said this in the book, but she lives in Paris and San Francisco, and therefore "flies over" her place of birth (literally) and the lives of her past, hence the title. As far as the premise, what more could you ask for? She beautifully tells the story of her family and how she came to be a writer in short, spare prose. She even says she's more of a Hemingway than a poet. In other words, there is no mystery or flowery, vague artifice to her writing. On the back, it says the book "captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention." This is exactly what she captures in every single chapter.
2. "Johnson was pretentious and condescending toward America." Good grief. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the whole story was an elegy to her American roots and the strength and resiliency of her ancestors. Her childhood was like a Norman Rockwell painting, and even the difficult times (which were few and far between) highlighted the triumphant nature of the typical American. In the beginning of the book, which makes me suspect that this is where many reviewers stopped reading, she does make a statement that life in other parts of the world is sometimes easier, especially France. Well, truth be told, if you've ever been to Paris (I've been twice), it is! I love America, but it's not the be all. Believe it or not, there are places that do things better, not everything, but some things and sometimes a lot of things. That's not unpatriotic, that's just recognizing and appreciating things outside of yourself and your own world.
3. "The author name dropped." Where? She uses fictitious names for the generals she describes in the opening. How can you name drop without actually dropping the real names? Perhaps this accusation is for her work with Francis Ford Copppola and Stanley Kubric? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like if you ever get the chance to work with these greats and you don't include it in your story, you've done a disservice worse than name dropping. You've deprived the rest of us from knowing what it was like and held back any hope or lessons we might gleam for how it's done. Can we all agree that working with Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, and Sydney Pollack, and then telling us the details of how great it was to work with them, gets you a pass for name dropping? One other thing, isn't Diane Johnson a name as well? Isn't that why her memoir was published, because she has made a "name" for herself in the literary world?
Giving a work like this a 1-star is wrong in my opinion. This is why I loved this book:
In my view, this book is one of the greatest rebuttals of all time (I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much). If you read it with this in mind, you may also see the brilliance, as I did.
The book opens with an indictment (j'accuse) by a French friend, "Americans have an indifference to history. That's why you Americans seem so naive and don't really know where you're from." The French friend goes on to say that Americans always think they've descended from royalty.
What follows is a rich, detailed, breathtaking history of Diane Johnson's roots from the time they arrived in Canada (In an ironic twist, her ancestors were cousins to the French King, Louis XIV) until her eventual life now.
Johnson goes on to prove that she does know her roots and that her family did not, in fact, have an indifference to history. Johnson uncovers letters, memoirs, and documents that outline the trials of their early settling in America, the best being a memoir by her great-great-grandmother, Catherine Perkins, in 1876. Perkins detailed life on the Midwestern prairie is harrowing. She loses her first three children in a span of two weeks, yet some how has the resolve to say, "Thy will O God be done, not mine." (This is not a spoiler as Johnson references this early in the book.)
Johnson's short chronicle of her life in Moline, IL (the flyover part of the country) is not too dissimilar from Leave it to Beaver. Thanks to her desire to escape, however, Johnson eventually ends up in the "Mad Men" world of 1950s New York City, complete with cocktails and Sylvia Plath. Again, all a nod to history.
Though her writing is often spare, I wouldn't say she is Hemingwayesque. There were many beautiful passages and sentences that did, in fact, remind me of poetry. When she beautifully describes the flowers in Paris after her move there, I could almost smell them again. (And yes, flowers are better in France, sorry.) She also wraps up each short chapter with masterful sentences that cause the reader to pause and deliberate about where's she's taken you and where she might go next. I will say this, even though much of the highlights of her life could be found in a wikipedia article, I found myself often surprised at where her (stream of consciousness) story lead. That's because her writing is so good, and her mind is one that could fascinate anyone.
This is an excellent memoir. It's definitely different than the typical in that it covers so much time and so much story, but she does this expertly and escapes any and all fluff.
I didn't want to do this, but I can't stand injustice, and I believe this book has been unfairly reviewed on here.
Before my review, I want to rebut some of the other reviews I've seen. I feel like if you can give a well-respected and brilliant writer only 1 star for their life story, you can handle a rebuttal:
1. "The book's premise and title were misleading." Uh, I don't know how many times she said this in the book, but she lives in Paris and San Francisco, and therefore "flies over" her place of birth (literally) and the lives of her past, hence the title. As far as the premise, what more could you ask for? She beautifully tells the story of her family and how she came to be a writer in short, spare prose. She even says she's more of a Hemingway than a poet. In other words, there is no mystery or flowery, vague artifice to her writing. On the back, it says the book "captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention." This is exactly what she captures in every single chapter.
2. "Johnson was pretentious and condescending toward America." Good grief. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the whole story was an elegy to her American roots and the strength and resiliency of her ancestors. Her childhood was like a Norman Rockwell painting, and even the difficult times (which were few and far between) highlighted the triumphant nature of the typical American. In the beginning of the book, which makes me suspect that this is where many reviewers stopped reading, she does make a statement that life in other parts of the world is sometimes easier, especially France. Well, truth be told, if you've ever been to Paris (I've been twice), it is! I love America, but it's not the be all. Believe it or not, there are places that do things better, not everything, but some things and sometimes a lot of things. That's not unpatriotic, that's just recognizing and appreciating things outside of yourself and your own world.
3. "The author name dropped." Where? She uses fictitious names for the generals she describes in the opening. How can you name drop without actually dropping the real names? Perhaps this accusation is for her work with Francis Ford Copppola and Stanley Kubric? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like if you ever get the chance to work with these greats and you don't include it in your story, you've done a disservice worse than name dropping. You've deprived the rest of us from knowing what it was like and held back any hope or lessons we might gleam for how it's done. Can we all agree that working with Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, and Sydney Pollack, and then telling us the details of how great it was to work with them, gets you a pass for name dropping? One other thing, isn't Diane Johnson a name as well? Isn't that why her memoir was published, because she has made a "name" for herself in the literary world?
Giving a work like this a 1-star is wrong in my opinion. This is why I loved this book:
In my view, this book is one of the greatest rebuttals of all time (I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much). If you read it with this in mind, you may also see the brilliance, as I did.
The book opens with an indictment (j'accuse) by a French friend, "Americans have an indifference to history. That's why you Americans seem so naive and don't really know where you're from." The French friend goes on to say that Americans always think they've descended from royalty.
What follows is a rich, detailed, breathtaking history of Diane Johnson's roots from the time they arrived in Canada (In an ironic twist, her ancestors were cousins to the French King, Louis XIV) until her eventual life now.
Johnson goes on to prove that she does know her roots and that her family did not, in fact, have an indifference to history. Johnson uncovers letters, memoirs, and documents that outline the trials of their early settling in America, the best being a memoir by her great-great-grandmother, Catherine Perkins, in 1876. Perkins detailed life on the Midwestern prairie is harrowing. She loses her first three children in a span of two weeks, yet some how has the resolve to say, "Thy will O God be done, not mine." (This is not a spoiler as Johnson references this early in the book.)
Johnson's short chronicle of her life in Moline, IL (the flyover part of the country) is not too dissimilar from Leave it to Beaver. Thanks to her desire to escape, however, Johnson eventually ends up in the "Mad Men" world of 1950s New York City, complete with cocktails and Sylvia Plath. Again, all a nod to history.
Though her writing is often spare, I wouldn't say she is Hemingwayesque. There were many beautiful passages and sentences that did, in fact, remind me of poetry. When she beautifully describes the flowers in Paris after her move there, I could almost smell them again. (And yes, flowers are better in France, sorry.) She also wraps up each short chapter with masterful sentences that cause the reader to pause and deliberate about where's she's taken you and where she might go next. I will say this, even though much of the highlights of her life could be found in a wikipedia article, I found myself often surprised at where her (stream of consciousness) story lead. That's because her writing is so good, and her mind is one that could fascinate anyone.
This is an excellent memoir. It's definitely different than the typical in that it covers so much time and so much story, but she does this expertly and escapes any and all fluff.
December 28, 2013
Elegant and smart writing. Love Diane Johnson. I'll read anything she writes.
January 12, 2015
(2.5) The generally low ratings for this memoir reflect its scattered nature. In places it’s fascinating; in others, it’s entirely dull. (I read about two-thirds, skipping over the colonial history section and skimming some of the other chapters.) Johnson was prompted to look back through her family history when a snooty French friend declared that Americans are indifferent to and ignorant of history. “It’s when you’re in a foreign land and someone criticizes the United States that you come to feel most American, and in my case, most midwestern,” she grimaces.
And so Johnson returns through memory and documentary evidence to her hometown of Moline, Illinois – “A pleasant place, surrounded by cornfields, I had always longed to get out of. ... We were Default Americans, plump, milk, and Protestant.” She devotes over one-third of the text to Part III, “Eighteenth-Century Beginnings.” If you have a particular interest in this time period, you should enjoy this section. If not, you might like to skip over it as I did. Most of it is about her great-great-grandmother Catharine A. Martin, whose life is known through a written memoir she left behind, along with letters. “What wonderful names people had back then: Erastus, Ambrose, Franceway, Eleazer. How often they died young.” Indeed, Martin lost three daughters to scarlet fever within one week of 1833.
What Johnson is trying to do here is tell America’s history through the history of her own family. It sometimes works. For instance, I loved seeing a photo of two of her female ancestors in Civil War drag – next to a chair she still owns. But I couldn’t get around the fact that all this eighteenth-century history was pretty darn boring. The book picks up again with Johnson’s memories of a 1950s Midwestern childhood – similar to Susan Allen Toth’s Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood and Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (both Iowa-set).
Johnson locates her childhood somewhere between colonial life and modernity: “I was aware, growing up, that people like us were in some kind of transitional period between an old-fashioned world and another modern, different one where people didn’t make things by hand.” On visits to her mother’s hometown in Illinois, she discovered “a society that resembled, more than any other fictional equivalent I can think of, the one depicted by Jane Austen or Mrs. Gaskell, even in the 1950s still almost preindustrial, preoccupied with canning and quilting, a general store, print dresses, aprons, even wagons.” It’s enough to make one nostalgic for Illinois.
“There’s a theory of memory that says that you remember more of the things that happen when you were happy than when you weren’t. (There is another that says the opposite.)” Johnson presents a good mixture of the two, including her career in magazines, screenwriting, and novels; motherhood to four children; divorce; and living abroad. “The one thing you, we, Americans, are not allowed to say is that there is somewhere better than America to live. This is an unspeakable apostasy, even though anyone who has lived in one of the better places knows it’s true.” (Amen.) In one of the final chapters, Johnson quotes V.S. Pritchett’s autobiography: “I became a foreigner. For myself, that is what a writer is—a man living on the other side of a frontier.”
Here Johnson proves she’s no provincial American indifferent to history. Unfortunately, the resulting book isn’t as coherent or interesting as it should have been.
I was delighted to win a copy in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.
And so Johnson returns through memory and documentary evidence to her hometown of Moline, Illinois – “A pleasant place, surrounded by cornfields, I had always longed to get out of. ... We were Default Americans, plump, milk, and Protestant.” She devotes over one-third of the text to Part III, “Eighteenth-Century Beginnings.” If you have a particular interest in this time period, you should enjoy this section. If not, you might like to skip over it as I did. Most of it is about her great-great-grandmother Catharine A. Martin, whose life is known through a written memoir she left behind, along with letters. “What wonderful names people had back then: Erastus, Ambrose, Franceway, Eleazer. How often they died young.” Indeed, Martin lost three daughters to scarlet fever within one week of 1833.
What Johnson is trying to do here is tell America’s history through the history of her own family. It sometimes works. For instance, I loved seeing a photo of two of her female ancestors in Civil War drag – next to a chair she still owns. But I couldn’t get around the fact that all this eighteenth-century history was pretty darn boring. The book picks up again with Johnson’s memories of a 1950s Midwestern childhood – similar to Susan Allen Toth’s Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood and Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (both Iowa-set).
Johnson locates her childhood somewhere between colonial life and modernity: “I was aware, growing up, that people like us were in some kind of transitional period between an old-fashioned world and another modern, different one where people didn’t make things by hand.” On visits to her mother’s hometown in Illinois, she discovered “a society that resembled, more than any other fictional equivalent I can think of, the one depicted by Jane Austen or Mrs. Gaskell, even in the 1950s still almost preindustrial, preoccupied with canning and quilting, a general store, print dresses, aprons, even wagons.” It’s enough to make one nostalgic for Illinois.
“There’s a theory of memory that says that you remember more of the things that happen when you were happy than when you weren’t. (There is another that says the opposite.)” Johnson presents a good mixture of the two, including her career in magazines, screenwriting, and novels; motherhood to four children; divorce; and living abroad. “The one thing you, we, Americans, are not allowed to say is that there is somewhere better than America to live. This is an unspeakable apostasy, even though anyone who has lived in one of the better places knows it’s true.” (Amen.) In one of the final chapters, Johnson quotes V.S. Pritchett’s autobiography: “I became a foreigner. For myself, that is what a writer is—a man living on the other side of a frontier.”
Here Johnson proves she’s no provincial American indifferent to history. Unfortunately, the resulting book isn’t as coherent or interesting as it should have been.
I was delighted to win a copy in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.
June 8, 2014
Kind of a strange book. I decided to give this a try even after reading some of the less enthusiastic reviews on here because I thought I might identify with the author's supposed focus in this book. Like the author, I was born and raised in Illinois and have some familiarity with some of the towns she writes about here (though I've lived primarily in and around Chicago, and went to college in southern Illinois, I do have relatives in Davenport, Bettendorf, and Rock Island--all near Moline, which is the main town Johnson discusses in the book). Also like the author, I left the Midwest to live or spend large chunks of time in other parts of the country and world (Ireland, Boston, France, and Australia). I didn't really identify with her Illinois, or her Midwest, much. I found Johnson's experiences and point of view pretty WASPy--though hardly pretentious, as some other reviewers on here have decided. Just a bit...chilly? Maybe even myopic (ironically, considered how well-traveled and accomplished Johnson is)? I can't quite put my finger on the right word.... Quite often throughout the book, Johnson states that her point of view or experiences or inclinations are rather like most Midwestern people's, or like most women's, or like most...you get the drift. But as a Midwestern woman myself, a fair bit of these assumptions were news to me. Our similarities in geographical birth and upbringing and adult wanderlust aren't enough to bridge the gap between our differences in religious upbringing, family size, ethnic background, family education history, family economic history, and marital/parental status. At one point, Johnson references the only two Jewish guys she knew growing up in Moline and it brings her to her family's view on the Catholics "across the river in Davenport, Iowa," specifically, their view on Catholic women ("condemned to lives of thankless childbearing and female servitude"). Reading this, I thought 'That would be my people she's talking about, I guess,' and that was about the only time I kinda-sorta recognized myself in this book about Illinoisans, Midwesterners, and "flyover folk" in general.
But the real problem for me came in the last section of the book, when Johnson suddenly begins inserting her memories of working with great Hollywood and London film directors. It's not that this part isn't interesting. It just has no place in a book supposedly dedicated to memories of and thoughts about flyover people. Perhaps if she had thought to weave in how her Midwestern upbringing influenced her sensibilities, and thus affected her choices and relationships or dogged her desire to reinvent herself once she left the Midwest for New York City, then California, then London and France, etc., the inclusion of these particular memories would have made more sense. Instead it just reads like you accidentally opened up another book altogether. Could she not have saved these other, distinctly non-flyover memories for another book, or an article or something? In the end I felt like this was a writer just spending all she's got in her mind, regardless of whether everything is being spent in all different currencies for all kinds of objects that don't really go together. Johnson is 80 years old now (one year younger than my supposedly servile, thanklessly childbearing, Illinois Catholic mother). Johnson has written over a dozen books in the course of her career--but maybe at this stage she's not confident she's got one more beyond this one left in her?
But the real problem for me came in the last section of the book, when Johnson suddenly begins inserting her memories of working with great Hollywood and London film directors. It's not that this part isn't interesting. It just has no place in a book supposedly dedicated to memories of and thoughts about flyover people. Perhaps if she had thought to weave in how her Midwestern upbringing influenced her sensibilities, and thus affected her choices and relationships or dogged her desire to reinvent herself once she left the Midwest for New York City, then California, then London and France, etc., the inclusion of these particular memories would have made more sense. Instead it just reads like you accidentally opened up another book altogether. Could she not have saved these other, distinctly non-flyover memories for another book, or an article or something? In the end I felt like this was a writer just spending all she's got in her mind, regardless of whether everything is being spent in all different currencies for all kinds of objects that don't really go together. Johnson is 80 years old now (one year younger than my supposedly servile, thanklessly childbearing, Illinois Catholic mother). Johnson has written over a dozen books in the course of her career--but maybe at this stage she's not confident she's got one more beyond this one left in her?
January 17, 2014
This book is billed as a memoir, with the title referring to Johnson’s Midwestern origins (she grew up in Moline, Illinois) and residents of the coasts calling the middle of the country flyover states. Rather than write about her own life, the author fills much of this book with bits of her family history that she has learned through research— where some of her ancestors came from and a little of what their lives were like. In addition to not feeling like it really belongs in a memoir, this part of the story is not all that interesting. At least it is a match in its’ monotony for the rest of the tale that is about Johnson’s life.
I had expected more from this author. I knew that my wife had read some of her works of fiction and enjoyed them. Based on this book, I think that Ms. Johnson should stick to writing about fictional characters rather than attempting to chronicle the lives of real ones. I had a difficult time slogging through FLYOVER LIVES and only finished it because I felt obligated to, having won the book on a Goodreads giveaway.
I had expected more from this author. I knew that my wife had read some of her works of fiction and enjoyed them. Based on this book, I think that Ms. Johnson should stick to writing about fictional characters rather than attempting to chronicle the lives of real ones. I had a difficult time slogging through FLYOVER LIVES and only finished it because I felt obligated to, having won the book on a Goodreads giveaway.
December 7, 2024
What does writing the script for The Shining & moving to the most expensive neighborhood in London with hired help but worrying about finances have to do with living in the Midwest?
July 6, 2014
While the concept of urban vs. rural is nothing new, the concept of "flyover" is fairly recent -- the U.S. first saw nonstop transcontinental commercial flights in the 1950s, and the word itself is documented only in the past 30 years. Initially a dismissive, if not disparaging, term, "flyover" has been taken back (to some extent) by those of us in the states whose wide blue skies are crisscrossed by contrails.
But readers expecting insights into modern Middle America will not be getting them from Diane Johnson's "Flyover Lives." This choppy, inaptly titled memoir provides some interesting stories, but never really comes together.
The book opens in France, where Johnson is visiting some bigwigs at a summer house and the discussion turns to history and the awareness -- or lack thereof -- of the French and the Americans of their own history. Then comes a short section about Johnson’s largely happy, largely middle-class upbringing in Moline, Ill.
From there, she delves into the past, to her ancestors who first came to the Midwest from the area around the U.S.-Canada border. This section, about half the book, is by far the most interesting part of the book, as it draws heavily on old family letters and diaries that detail everyday life in the 19th century, both in the Northeast and in the Midwest. The narration flows well and the stories spring to life (and will make many readers grateful for such modern conveniences as plumbing, telephones and doctors).
But then we’re back to Johnson’s life, jumping from Illinois to California to England to France and back and forth. The writing itself is artful and evocative throughout -- unsurprising from a Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-nominated author -- but the book seems more like a loose collection of essays than a unified whole.
And the “Flyover Lives” of the title never materialize. Johnson’s ancestors -- and her own childhood -- predate “flyover” by decades. By Johnson’s own admission, she couldn’t get away soon enough: she left Moline as a young woman and didn’t return for 50 years. This lends an air of condescension to many of her observations, as if we’re all still unsophisticated, uncultured rubes: “In my childhood, people … had long since left off wondering about what went on the world outside; maybe this is still a midwestern mind-set, and, paradoxically, the greater urbanity offered by television now may have increased the impression that the outside world is a deplorable mass of tear gas and bombs.”
It may have seemed that way when she was a child in the 1930s and ’40s, but we’ve moved forward since then. We may be the ones the politicians talk about when they talk about “real America,” but we don’t fit neatly into any one box: we are rural and urban, multiracial and multiethnic, with widely varying interests and professions, no more or less “American” than any other American.
But readers expecting insights into modern Middle America will not be getting them from Diane Johnson's "Flyover Lives." This choppy, inaptly titled memoir provides some interesting stories, but never really comes together.
The book opens in France, where Johnson is visiting some bigwigs at a summer house and the discussion turns to history and the awareness -- or lack thereof -- of the French and the Americans of their own history. Then comes a short section about Johnson’s largely happy, largely middle-class upbringing in Moline, Ill.
From there, she delves into the past, to her ancestors who first came to the Midwest from the area around the U.S.-Canada border. This section, about half the book, is by far the most interesting part of the book, as it draws heavily on old family letters and diaries that detail everyday life in the 19th century, both in the Northeast and in the Midwest. The narration flows well and the stories spring to life (and will make many readers grateful for such modern conveniences as plumbing, telephones and doctors).
But then we’re back to Johnson’s life, jumping from Illinois to California to England to France and back and forth. The writing itself is artful and evocative throughout -- unsurprising from a Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-nominated author -- but the book seems more like a loose collection of essays than a unified whole.
And the “Flyover Lives” of the title never materialize. Johnson’s ancestors -- and her own childhood -- predate “flyover” by decades. By Johnson’s own admission, she couldn’t get away soon enough: she left Moline as a young woman and didn’t return for 50 years. This lends an air of condescension to many of her observations, as if we’re all still unsophisticated, uncultured rubes: “In my childhood, people … had long since left off wondering about what went on the world outside; maybe this is still a midwestern mind-set, and, paradoxically, the greater urbanity offered by television now may have increased the impression that the outside world is a deplorable mass of tear gas and bombs.”
It may have seemed that way when she was a child in the 1930s and ’40s, but we’ve moved forward since then. We may be the ones the politicians talk about when they talk about “real America,” but we don’t fit neatly into any one box: we are rural and urban, multiracial and multiethnic, with widely varying interests and professions, no more or less “American” than any other American.
February 2, 2014
Although this book is titled Flyover Lives A Memoir, it reads more like an exploration of ancestry than a memoir. The opening section, one I struggled to slog through, describes the author and her husband visiting friends in France. The friend comments that Americans have no sense of family history and the world because they know nothing of their ancestors. This taunt resonates with Johnson, and spurs her to look into her roots.
The book really takes off as Johnson describes the grueling lives of her ancestors as they migrated to the Midwest. Her stories start in the early 1700s. She discovers letters and journals, and, like the quilts her female ancestors made, Johnson pieces together her family history from these scraps. Her descriptions are rich, the writing in these chapters engaging and warm. In an anecdote reminiscent of the changing of immigrant last names at Ellis Island, Johnson shares that Rene and Francois became Ranni and Franceway, and that those names were handed down through generations. She is able to place the story of her relatives into the larger picture of the struggle to establish a household and raise a family in the part of the country facetiously known as the “flyover” by East and West coast residents; this is the part of the United States one flies over to get to civilization. The title is misleading in that it appears to subconsciously side with the dismissive view of the American Midwest, when in reality, there is no such thing as a flyover life; Johnson’s ancestors shine as she uncovers their history. These chapters were my favorite part of the book; coherent, lush narrative writing and interesting stories.
The last several chapters seem a bit disjointed, as though Johnson was trying to fill space by plugging in bits and pieces of her personal life. Those readers not familiar with Johnson will find themselves confused, as she “flies over” her own life. She makes a superficial attempt to connect herself to her family roots. Many times she mentions how, growing up in Moline, all she wanted was to get away. The impression is that the Midwest stood still while the rest of the country was growing and evolving. On a return many years later, she seems surprised to notice that Moline is actually a picturesque area.
I requested and received this as a Goodreads Giveaway, as I enjoy Johnson’s skill with narrative. I would not, however, recommend it to somebody who has never read Johnson.
The book really takes off as Johnson describes the grueling lives of her ancestors as they migrated to the Midwest. Her stories start in the early 1700s. She discovers letters and journals, and, like the quilts her female ancestors made, Johnson pieces together her family history from these scraps. Her descriptions are rich, the writing in these chapters engaging and warm. In an anecdote reminiscent of the changing of immigrant last names at Ellis Island, Johnson shares that Rene and Francois became Ranni and Franceway, and that those names were handed down through generations. She is able to place the story of her relatives into the larger picture of the struggle to establish a household and raise a family in the part of the country facetiously known as the “flyover” by East and West coast residents; this is the part of the United States one flies over to get to civilization. The title is misleading in that it appears to subconsciously side with the dismissive view of the American Midwest, when in reality, there is no such thing as a flyover life; Johnson’s ancestors shine as she uncovers their history. These chapters were my favorite part of the book; coherent, lush narrative writing and interesting stories.
The last several chapters seem a bit disjointed, as though Johnson was trying to fill space by plugging in bits and pieces of her personal life. Those readers not familiar with Johnson will find themselves confused, as she “flies over” her own life. She makes a superficial attempt to connect herself to her family roots. Many times she mentions how, growing up in Moline, all she wanted was to get away. The impression is that the Midwest stood still while the rest of the country was growing and evolving. On a return many years later, she seems surprised to notice that Moline is actually a picturesque area.
I requested and received this as a Goodreads Giveaway, as I enjoy Johnson’s skill with narrative. I would not, however, recommend it to somebody who has never read Johnson.
January 2, 2014
I won this book in a give away. When I signed up for the the give awa,y I was under the impression that the book was about Diane Johnson's ancestors in the Midwest, whose lives had been forgotten. I was interested in the stories of these ordinary people. When the book arrived, I noticed the subtitle "A Memoir", I knew that I should expect part of the book to be about Diane Johnson herself.
In the prologue called "A weekend with generals" Johnson sets out to tell how the remark of a French friend about Americans being "indifferent to history" causes her to investigate her forebears. However, Johnson finds it necessary to expound on the presence of two army generals and their wives at the moment her friend makes the remark. This was an early tip off of the name dropping later in the book.
Part II of the book chronicles Johnson's childhood in Moline, IL. To me the description of Johnson's youth was not very different from other small town children.
Finally, in part III, "Eighteenth- Century Beginnings" we read about the ancestors for a little more than 85 of the book's 263 pages. The biography of Catherine Martin (the author's great-great-great grandmother) is the most interesting part of the book. Hers is the kind of life we forget about with its frequent deaths, slow arduous travel, hard work and uncomfortable living quarters. Here I actually learned something.
In Part IV "Modern Days" we are back at Johnson's own life. This disturbed and confused me. Why does the author combine her memoir with the story about her ancestors many generations ago? I had a hard time changing from Catherine's toils to Johnson writing movie scripts with famous Hollywood denizens.
Here we see the main weakness of the book, it, tries to be two things at the same time: a historical biography and a personal memoir. With a little more research, especially about her own life Johnson could have managed two entirely different books. Add to that a total rewrite of the memoir, and the result would be much more the quality writing we have come to expect from Diane Johnson.
In the prologue called "A weekend with generals" Johnson sets out to tell how the remark of a French friend about Americans being "indifferent to history" causes her to investigate her forebears. However, Johnson finds it necessary to expound on the presence of two army generals and their wives at the moment her friend makes the remark. This was an early tip off of the name dropping later in the book.
Part II of the book chronicles Johnson's childhood in Moline, IL. To me the description of Johnson's youth was not very different from other small town children.
Finally, in part III, "Eighteenth- Century Beginnings" we read about the ancestors for a little more than 85 of the book's 263 pages. The biography of Catherine Martin (the author's great-great-great grandmother) is the most interesting part of the book. Hers is the kind of life we forget about with its frequent deaths, slow arduous travel, hard work and uncomfortable living quarters. Here I actually learned something.
In Part IV "Modern Days" we are back at Johnson's own life. This disturbed and confused me. Why does the author combine her memoir with the story about her ancestors many generations ago? I had a hard time changing from Catherine's toils to Johnson writing movie scripts with famous Hollywood denizens.
Here we see the main weakness of the book, it, tries to be two things at the same time: a historical biography and a personal memoir. With a little more research, especially about her own life Johnson could have managed two entirely different books. Add to that a total rewrite of the memoir, and the result would be much more the quality writing we have come to expect from Diane Johnson.
January 1, 2015
I won this book from Goodreads.com
Like some of the other reviewers, I found this book interesting as I had spent a few years around Moline and visited a couple of the same places as the author.
I did get a bit of a giggle, though, when it was mentioned that most Americans are unaware of their past and believe they are descended from royalty. I had done a great deal of genealogical research when I was younger and never shared in these delusions. My ancestors were more 'fringe' (for lack of a better word) members of society. In my family tree there are Eastern European Jews, Native Americans, Amish, carnival folk and horse thieves among others. Nothing noble there... I actually had a researcher contact me because he was writing a book about some of my ancestors, and after realizing he was trying to shake some nuts out of my family tree, I became a bit more reluctant to provide additional information. I wasn't sure I wanted to be associated with the project since people think I am weird enough as it is. I shouldn't make it worse by letting the cat out of the bag about some of my wackier ancestors.
It was nice to read about Ms. Johnson's experiences while looking into her own past, though she and her ancestors were so incredibly 'normal'. I loved her writing style and found it maintained my interest. I also agree with many of the statements made by the author. I enjoyed this book and would not hesitate to recommend it to others that may also enjoy memoirs.
Like some of the other reviewers, I found this book interesting as I had spent a few years around Moline and visited a couple of the same places as the author.
I did get a bit of a giggle, though, when it was mentioned that most Americans are unaware of their past and believe they are descended from royalty. I had done a great deal of genealogical research when I was younger and never shared in these delusions. My ancestors were more 'fringe' (for lack of a better word) members of society. In my family tree there are Eastern European Jews, Native Americans, Amish, carnival folk and horse thieves among others. Nothing noble there... I actually had a researcher contact me because he was writing a book about some of my ancestors, and after realizing he was trying to shake some nuts out of my family tree, I became a bit more reluctant to provide additional information. I wasn't sure I wanted to be associated with the project since people think I am weird enough as it is. I shouldn't make it worse by letting the cat out of the bag about some of my wackier ancestors.
It was nice to read about Ms. Johnson's experiences while looking into her own past, though she and her ancestors were so incredibly 'normal'. I loved her writing style and found it maintained my interest. I also agree with many of the statements made by the author. I enjoyed this book and would not hesitate to recommend it to others that may also enjoy memoirs.
April 7, 2016
I feel quite torn in my feelings about "Flyover Lives", a sort of/not really memoir of Johnson's life. I initially found myself drawn in to her unique approach to the notion of a memoir, which is set up in the early pages as an exploration of the Foreign/American relationship. If one knows nothing of her story at this point, we are let in on the fact that her own story acts as something of a commentary on her experience with foreign perceptions of America, namely the inference that Americans (still) remain indifferent to history and roots, and how coming in to contact with this perception changed her. This fuels her desire to explore her own family roots, both as a means of recognizing her own history/roots, while at the same time marrying her story to the question of America's own history. As this plays out, Johnson is able to insert a bit of philosophical pandering to even deeper questions, such as what does it mean to call a place home, and to leave and/or reinvent our perceptions of "home". And ultimately, how does memory, a key part of the process of moving past an indifference to history, shape us as we continue to move forward in our lives.
All of this is wrapped up in the title of this memoir, Flyover Lives, which is essentially what she is doing. She is stepping in to her own memories (and revisiting her once home) from a "flyover" bird's eye view to come to grips with all of these questions for herself, and to help bring some understanding to how she arrived to where she is at now. And in the process she expands by looking back to the ancestors that brought her to her "home" in the first place (which takes us back through her own ancestral line to arriving on American soil as immigrants, and eventually emigrating to the mid-west. All of this process is actually (for me) somewhat inspiring, and if the book succeeds it succeeds in sparking the desire to do my own flyover.
However clear her intentions are for this memoir, it is also clear that the end product ends up bogged down by some problems and a series of disjointed parts. The first can be applied to the reader who is not already familiar with Johnson's own story. We are brought in to her story with the hope of narrowing in two things: First, why history (of family and Country) is important and whether we (ourselves) are actually indifferent to it (and if we are, how we can change this). Secondly, we understand that what we are to gain from Johnson's approach is a particular insight to the culture and family life of her mid-western American experience. For anyone who shares this proximity or an interest in this region, this becomes a specific draw.
It is as she explores the first, and in her tendency (along the journey) to avoid and deviate from the second, that the book becomes somewhat disappointing in the end. As to the first, we are brought in to the questions that Johnson wants to explore in light of the second thing, which is her humble mid-western perspective being framed through her own life accomplishments. The real problem is that by the time we reach the end it becomes easy for the reader to feel like she has been less than upfront about just where these accomplishments have brought her. This is no more evident than in the final chapter (at which we finally arrive at the "modern" era) and the seeming deviation from the question of history and humble mid-western philosophy towards a lengthy section of "who she is" as an accomplished and award winning screen writer, novelist with a ton of name dropping and associations in tow. It is not that her accomplished life is something that needed to be glossed over or avoided, rather that it feels a bit disingenuous when we are left without a clue of the actual prestigious position of her later years. This become doubly difficult (for me as a reader) when what feels like a bunch of name-dropping in the end tries to double back and put us back in to the place of humble beginnings (both figuratively and literally as she returns to her child hood home in the end).
The other part of pairing these two parts (her question of history and her own life story) that ends up feeling disingenuous is the way her later life and career influences her perspective of the more intimate parts of the mid-western character. This includes her religious, political and even national perspective. Again, if the reader was given a clue at the beginning as to whose memoir we were actually reading (given her involvement in film, and her well ingrained philosophy as a writer), we might fairly expect the subtle cynicism that ends up becoming clear by the end. Who she is (in the end) is someone who has been highly influenced as a "foreigner", specifically as a citizen of France (which has gained her a handle on the foreign perspective towards Americans), and someone whose own involvement in the world of art and storytelling has shaped a sort of narrow look at her own religious, political and American past. Her memoir becomes less a humble and honest love story with her own identity, and a bit of a (even if very subtle) polemic towards ideas. If I had known this before, I might have been interested to know how she arrived to where she is, but instead I felt like I was taken in to her past (and America's past), and then fed her final ideology without warning.
This remains my conflict. It's well written, and as a concept remains very intriguing. She does some neat things as she unfolds her own families ancestory and pairs it with American history, and there are worthwhile moments. I just felt a bit taken advantage of in the end.
All of this is wrapped up in the title of this memoir, Flyover Lives, which is essentially what she is doing. She is stepping in to her own memories (and revisiting her once home) from a "flyover" bird's eye view to come to grips with all of these questions for herself, and to help bring some understanding to how she arrived to where she is at now. And in the process she expands by looking back to the ancestors that brought her to her "home" in the first place (which takes us back through her own ancestral line to arriving on American soil as immigrants, and eventually emigrating to the mid-west. All of this process is actually (for me) somewhat inspiring, and if the book succeeds it succeeds in sparking the desire to do my own flyover.
However clear her intentions are for this memoir, it is also clear that the end product ends up bogged down by some problems and a series of disjointed parts. The first can be applied to the reader who is not already familiar with Johnson's own story. We are brought in to her story with the hope of narrowing in two things: First, why history (of family and Country) is important and whether we (ourselves) are actually indifferent to it (and if we are, how we can change this). Secondly, we understand that what we are to gain from Johnson's approach is a particular insight to the culture and family life of her mid-western American experience. For anyone who shares this proximity or an interest in this region, this becomes a specific draw.
It is as she explores the first, and in her tendency (along the journey) to avoid and deviate from the second, that the book becomes somewhat disappointing in the end. As to the first, we are brought in to the questions that Johnson wants to explore in light of the second thing, which is her humble mid-western perspective being framed through her own life accomplishments. The real problem is that by the time we reach the end it becomes easy for the reader to feel like she has been less than upfront about just where these accomplishments have brought her. This is no more evident than in the final chapter (at which we finally arrive at the "modern" era) and the seeming deviation from the question of history and humble mid-western philosophy towards a lengthy section of "who she is" as an accomplished and award winning screen writer, novelist with a ton of name dropping and associations in tow. It is not that her accomplished life is something that needed to be glossed over or avoided, rather that it feels a bit disingenuous when we are left without a clue of the actual prestigious position of her later years. This become doubly difficult (for me as a reader) when what feels like a bunch of name-dropping in the end tries to double back and put us back in to the place of humble beginnings (both figuratively and literally as she returns to her child hood home in the end).
The other part of pairing these two parts (her question of history and her own life story) that ends up feeling disingenuous is the way her later life and career influences her perspective of the more intimate parts of the mid-western character. This includes her religious, political and even national perspective. Again, if the reader was given a clue at the beginning as to whose memoir we were actually reading (given her involvement in film, and her well ingrained philosophy as a writer), we might fairly expect the subtle cynicism that ends up becoming clear by the end. Who she is (in the end) is someone who has been highly influenced as a "foreigner", specifically as a citizen of France (which has gained her a handle on the foreign perspective towards Americans), and someone whose own involvement in the world of art and storytelling has shaped a sort of narrow look at her own religious, political and American past. Her memoir becomes less a humble and honest love story with her own identity, and a bit of a (even if very subtle) polemic towards ideas. If I had known this before, I might have been interested to know how she arrived to where she is, but instead I felt like I was taken in to her past (and America's past), and then fed her final ideology without warning.
This remains my conflict. It's well written, and as a concept remains very intriguing. She does some neat things as she unfolds her own families ancestory and pairs it with American history, and there are worthwhile moments. I just felt a bit taken advantage of in the end.
February 12, 2014
I read Diane Johnson's novel L'Divorce about fourteen years ago, shortly after I'd moved to New York. I have always been a fan of "chick lit" but I like the variety that is more intelligent, with real problems and a slightly older, more mature protagonist and this book fit the bill. But I never read any of her other books. I knew she had written two follow-ups. I had no idea that she's published a dozen or so books, many of them non-fiction, some academic in nature, and is also an accomplished screenwriter, who wrote the screenplay for The Shining for Stanley Kubrick. Color me impressed.
What I really loved about this memoir thought wasn't the more traditional memoir parts of it, but instead when she dug into her family's past. See, Ms. Johnson lives part-time in Paris, and some French friends made a comment about how can Americans be expected to understand international politics, when we don't even know our own histories. And she admitted that was true. She didn't even know where her family was from. So she returned to the American Midwest, where she grew up in rural Illinois, to investigate who she came from and how those ancestors helped to forge the woman she became. She found old memoirs and letters in Great Aunt's attics and as she retold these stories, history came alive! After her ancestors came over from France (!), they settled in Canada and Michigan and lived in what she could only nicely call shacks, in the middle of no where with no neighbors, no family nearby, no medical help when needed, and sometimes no food. But they survived and eventually they settled in Illinois and Iowa where Diane grew up.
About ten years older than the Baby Boomers, she remembers WWII and her father fought in WWI. She grew up in an idyllic 1940s community where everyone knew everyone, no one locked their doors, and no one judged. The community took care of its less-capable and knew each others' dirty laundry, but kept that information to themselves. Diane ended up thirty, divorced, with four children, in England, trying to write a book (and trying to hide her divorce from her landlord who wouldn't rent to a divorcee.) She led an interesting life, with a happy remarriage and bi-continental living, but it was all the past generations looking down on her from their hard-scrabble lives that I found utterly fascinating. With the popularity of people looking back to find out our families' stories before they disappear, this book should have a broad readership. I loved it.
What I really loved about this memoir thought wasn't the more traditional memoir parts of it, but instead when she dug into her family's past. See, Ms. Johnson lives part-time in Paris, and some French friends made a comment about how can Americans be expected to understand international politics, when we don't even know our own histories. And she admitted that was true. She didn't even know where her family was from. So she returned to the American Midwest, where she grew up in rural Illinois, to investigate who she came from and how those ancestors helped to forge the woman she became. She found old memoirs and letters in Great Aunt's attics and as she retold these stories, history came alive! After her ancestors came over from France (!), they settled in Canada and Michigan and lived in what she could only nicely call shacks, in the middle of no where with no neighbors, no family nearby, no medical help when needed, and sometimes no food. But they survived and eventually they settled in Illinois and Iowa where Diane grew up.
About ten years older than the Baby Boomers, she remembers WWII and her father fought in WWI. She grew up in an idyllic 1940s community where everyone knew everyone, no one locked their doors, and no one judged. The community took care of its less-capable and knew each others' dirty laundry, but kept that information to themselves. Diane ended up thirty, divorced, with four children, in England, trying to write a book (and trying to hide her divorce from her landlord who wouldn't rent to a divorcee.) She led an interesting life, with a happy remarriage and bi-continental living, but it was all the past generations looking down on her from their hard-scrabble lives that I found utterly fascinating. With the popularity of people looking back to find out our families' stories before they disappear, this book should have a broad readership. I loved it.
June 30, 2014
After reading a few pages of this book, I considered returning it to the library without continuing. Johnson was living in France at the time. She was describing a visit with friends staying in a big, beautiful Italian house that three couples had rented together. None of it seemed connected to the world I knew or or longed to know. Inexplicably, I stuck with "Flyover Lives" for a while longer and was soon glad I did.
Johnson grew up in Illinois, and the "flyover lives" of the title was a pun on the term sometimes used to describe the American midwest--a place people fly over rather than endure on their way to the mountains, the coasts, or some more interesting place than they consider the wide, flat center of our country to be. The flyover lives, of course, were the lives of the women given so little space in our study of the historic development of our country. We know of the explorers, farmers, soldiers and cowboys, but what do we know of the lives of their women, particularly midwestern women?
Family diaries and letters add to the oral history offered by the few relatives both alive and old enough to give Johnson historic family information. Some of the incidents described are quite dramatic. Imagine becoming ill while delivering a baby, and having no medical help available for days. Or having your husband leave in winter for a 30 mile trip and receiving no further word for months, while you're at home alone with no neighbors much closer than his destination.
After exploring the lives of her predecessors, Johnson continues with her own fascinating life. After growing up in small midwester towns and cities, she went to a finishing school, married at 19 and had 4 children in short order. Unlike many women, however, that is only the beginning of her story. Eventually, she worked with movie producers on scripts she developed and wrote novels and nonfiction books. She lived abroad. She grew to know herself well.
At the very end of her book, Johnson spills a detail about the initial visit with her friends in Italy that had initially so turned me off. Suddenly this detail makes Johnson herself, and the people she shared the house with for 24 hours, became fully human, imperfect, and people I could easily relate to.
I strongly recommend this book!
Johnson grew up in Illinois, and the "flyover lives" of the title was a pun on the term sometimes used to describe the American midwest--a place people fly over rather than endure on their way to the mountains, the coasts, or some more interesting place than they consider the wide, flat center of our country to be. The flyover lives, of course, were the lives of the women given so little space in our study of the historic development of our country. We know of the explorers, farmers, soldiers and cowboys, but what do we know of the lives of their women, particularly midwestern women?
Family diaries and letters add to the oral history offered by the few relatives both alive and old enough to give Johnson historic family information. Some of the incidents described are quite dramatic. Imagine becoming ill while delivering a baby, and having no medical help available for days. Or having your husband leave in winter for a 30 mile trip and receiving no further word for months, while you're at home alone with no neighbors much closer than his destination.
After exploring the lives of her predecessors, Johnson continues with her own fascinating life. After growing up in small midwester towns and cities, she went to a finishing school, married at 19 and had 4 children in short order. Unlike many women, however, that is only the beginning of her story. Eventually, she worked with movie producers on scripts she developed and wrote novels and nonfiction books. She lived abroad. She grew to know herself well.
At the very end of her book, Johnson spills a detail about the initial visit with her friends in Italy that had initially so turned me off. Suddenly this detail makes Johnson herself, and the people she shared the house with for 24 hours, became fully human, imperfect, and people I could easily relate to.
I strongly recommend this book!
February 25, 2014
Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce (most familiar to me) and more than a dozen other books, pulls together her writing life and a story about those family members who came before her to shape her path. From a family that's been in the Midwest for generations, Johnson writes in Flyover Lives about a solid, no-frills upbringing, the results of family research, her life as a writer, her life as a single mother with young children and her current life with grown children and the freedom to travel with her husband. Johnson's book is divided into three sections: her life growing up in Moline, Illinois, the stories of her Midwestern ancestors and her writing life and more recent years.
I found Johnson's writing style to be in keeping with her upbringing: good stories told adequately but without all the flowery language. She presents her stories factually and honestly, and doesn't delve too deeply into her own inner workings. That's not to say that her stories aren't painting a picture of her life. They are, and in a way I really enjoyed reading. Johnson's early life in Moline is one that is different, simpler and more innocent than what children experience today, and it's nice to read about an upbringing like that. It was interesting to read about the family history she has uncovered and how it has helped her realize the good lot from which she comes, and the characteristics of her ancestors that she's inherited. I like the dichotomy of her life in Moline paired with her lives in other places, the premise for this book I think: Paris, California and London.
There were times I had trouble finding the string that should hold the memoir together. Beginning and ending the book with a recent house party in France were in the right place as bookends to prop everything up, but there were places I got lost in the middle. But there were things I enjoyed immensely: the anecdotes and the stories of how a writer became a writer. - See more at: http://betsyrm.blogspot.com/2014/02/b...
I found Johnson's writing style to be in keeping with her upbringing: good stories told adequately but without all the flowery language. She presents her stories factually and honestly, and doesn't delve too deeply into her own inner workings. That's not to say that her stories aren't painting a picture of her life. They are, and in a way I really enjoyed reading. Johnson's early life in Moline is one that is different, simpler and more innocent than what children experience today, and it's nice to read about an upbringing like that. It was interesting to read about the family history she has uncovered and how it has helped her realize the good lot from which she comes, and the characteristics of her ancestors that she's inherited. I like the dichotomy of her life in Moline paired with her lives in other places, the premise for this book I think: Paris, California and London.
There were times I had trouble finding the string that should hold the memoir together. Beginning and ending the book with a recent house party in France were in the right place as bookends to prop everything up, but there were places I got lost in the middle. But there were things I enjoyed immensely: the anecdotes and the stories of how a writer became a writer. - See more at: http://betsyrm.blogspot.com/2014/02/b...
March 24, 2014
This book is an engaging and enjoyable mixture of biography, memoir, travel, and historical investigation. The author is a writer who grew up in Moline, Illinois. In a nutshell, the motivation for the book comes from an offhand comment made to her by a French host that Americans have very little sense of history, even though they tend to think they were all descended from royalty. This comment sparked her to do some investigations into her own background and that of her ancestors. The book reports the results.
The central portion of the book chronicles the life of her great great great ... grandmother Catherine as she moved from New England to Ohio and eventually to Illinois. It is a fascinating concrete look at what life was like in America in the early 1900s. It reinforced to me how hard it is to understand what life was like for your parents or grandparents, not to mention for their grandparents. This strikes me as a central insight - that it is hard to come to a sense of historical context when the details of the lives of even or immediate ancestors are inaccessible to us. Even if we can find birth certificates and newspaper clippings, how do we know how these people lived back before there was indoor plumbing, electricity, or automobiles? The author also reflects on her own history and early life experiences and how she only came to see her relatives as people after they had come and gone. I even liked the sections on growing up in Moline and have long recognized that there is much history embedded in places where very few of us still visit, but instead flyover.
Despite the different parts, the book is an easy read and fits together well.
The central portion of the book chronicles the life of her great great great ... grandmother Catherine as she moved from New England to Ohio and eventually to Illinois. It is a fascinating concrete look at what life was like in America in the early 1900s. It reinforced to me how hard it is to understand what life was like for your parents or grandparents, not to mention for their grandparents. This strikes me as a central insight - that it is hard to come to a sense of historical context when the details of the lives of even or immediate ancestors are inaccessible to us. Even if we can find birth certificates and newspaper clippings, how do we know how these people lived back before there was indoor plumbing, electricity, or automobiles? The author also reflects on her own history and early life experiences and how she only came to see her relatives as people after they had come and gone. I even liked the sections on growing up in Moline and have long recognized that there is much history embedded in places where very few of us still visit, but instead flyover.
Despite the different parts, the book is an easy read and fits together well.
April 28, 2014
This was a nice change of pace read for me. A writer who now splits her time between California and France, reflects on her Midwestern childhood and that of her ancestors when a French friend claims that Americans don't care about their family histories.
As a proud midwesterner, I'm not sure why I wanted to read a book by someone who fled the Midwest as soon as she could, and if I were in a different mood I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it much, but I'm a closet genealogist and it was fun to hear about the author's pioneer ancestors and discover that at least branches of her family cared about preserving their history. And after buttering me up with stories of New England and Midwestern settlers' trials of living in log cabins, I was actually interested in hearing the author's story of finding her way in the world on the cusp of the Women's Lib movement.
I also appreciated the way she talked about place as a way of coming into yourself. While I didn't have to move across country and then across the ocean to come to myself, I did leave behind my small-town roots for the outskirts of a big city and couldn't believe how much more comfortable it made me feel in my own skin. So while I can't fathom her borderline ex-pat status, I do understand the need to move away from the place you grew up (even if your childhood was perfectly pleasant) in order to fully come into your adult self.
Kind of a strange little book, half genealogy, half memoir, but something a little different and not too taxing.
As a proud midwesterner, I'm not sure why I wanted to read a book by someone who fled the Midwest as soon as she could, and if I were in a different mood I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it much, but I'm a closet genealogist and it was fun to hear about the author's pioneer ancestors and discover that at least branches of her family cared about preserving their history. And after buttering me up with stories of New England and Midwestern settlers' trials of living in log cabins, I was actually interested in hearing the author's story of finding her way in the world on the cusp of the Women's Lib movement.
I also appreciated the way she talked about place as a way of coming into yourself. While I didn't have to move across country and then across the ocean to come to myself, I did leave behind my small-town roots for the outskirts of a big city and couldn't believe how much more comfortable it made me feel in my own skin. So while I can't fathom her borderline ex-pat status, I do understand the need to move away from the place you grew up (even if your childhood was perfectly pleasant) in order to fully come into your adult self.
Kind of a strange little book, half genealogy, half memoir, but something a little different and not too taxing.
July 20, 2014
I'm going to say right off the bat, I didn't love it. I had a really hard time finishing it because to me, it's not anything that I thought it was going to be. Which usually is fine, but in this case I had been hoping more for a historic account of her ancestors growing up in the Midwest way back when. In actuality, it's a memoir (which is my own fault for not paying attention) so it's not really what I thought it was. Then the prologue is about her time in France with several military generals and the like who all come off really snobbish and that just set the tone for me. I don't know if it was the fact I can't relate to them at all that turned me off or what but from then on I couldn't get into the book.
It's not all about her though, we do read a little bit about her childhood growing up in Moline, Illinois. We also read a little bit about her great-great-great grandmother, but it's not even a very large section so while I understand it's supposed to be the historical part of this book, it feels weird being in the author's memoir? But we go from that to the author talking about her career in Hollywood and the whole thing felt like a weird transition that doesn't fit with the rest of the book. You know what it feels like? It feels like that girlfriend we all have that one up's you on everything. You say you did this, she did it better AND with so and so.
Overall? I didn't love it. I have friends who absolutely adored this book and have told me within the last week I am an idiot if I didn't love this book. And maybe I am, but meh- I'll pass next time.
It's not all about her though, we do read a little bit about her childhood growing up in Moline, Illinois. We also read a little bit about her great-great-great grandmother, but it's not even a very large section so while I understand it's supposed to be the historical part of this book, it feels weird being in the author's memoir? But we go from that to the author talking about her career in Hollywood and the whole thing felt like a weird transition that doesn't fit with the rest of the book. You know what it feels like? It feels like that girlfriend we all have that one up's you on everything. You say you did this, she did it better AND with so and so.
Overall? I didn't love it. I have friends who absolutely adored this book and have told me within the last week I am an idiot if I didn't love this book. And maybe I am, but meh- I'll pass next time.
February 26, 2014
I received this book through a Goidreads First Reads giveaway.
I have to admit, if this had not been a First Reads book, and I had not felt "obligated" to read it and write a review, I probably would have stopped by page 20, marked the book as abandoned, and maybe left a brief review about what a pretentious snit the author is. I'm not really sure why she wrote the chapter about the generals, except that the visit was key in her researching her past and her ancestry. But what might work in a novel--the lengthy descriptions of the generals and their wives and the excessive snobbery of the weekend--really felt out of place in a memoir.
I actually had to put the book down for a few days after that chapter and I was not enthused about wading through the rest of the book. I was pleasantly surprised when I picked it up again to discover that the rest of the book is not as ugly as chapter one.
I do agree with some of the other reviewers that the author seems inordinately fond of name dropping. But I also found myself identifying with much of her story--a childhood in the Midwest, moving beyond the small town as a young adult, the change in perception of ones parents from mysterious authority figures to real people, etc. And I was intrigued by some of her theories about how Americans view themselves and geneology, even though I didn't always agree with her.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, although I can understand how others might not have.
I have to admit, if this had not been a First Reads book, and I had not felt "obligated" to read it and write a review, I probably would have stopped by page 20, marked the book as abandoned, and maybe left a brief review about what a pretentious snit the author is. I'm not really sure why she wrote the chapter about the generals, except that the visit was key in her researching her past and her ancestry. But what might work in a novel--the lengthy descriptions of the generals and their wives and the excessive snobbery of the weekend--really felt out of place in a memoir.
I actually had to put the book down for a few days after that chapter and I was not enthused about wading through the rest of the book. I was pleasantly surprised when I picked it up again to discover that the rest of the book is not as ugly as chapter one.
I do agree with some of the other reviewers that the author seems inordinately fond of name dropping. But I also found myself identifying with much of her story--a childhood in the Midwest, moving beyond the small town as a young adult, the change in perception of ones parents from mysterious authority figures to real people, etc. And I was intrigued by some of her theories about how Americans view themselves and geneology, even though I didn't always agree with her.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, although I can understand how others might not have.
September 28, 2014
I won this book Flyover lives on a good reads first reads giveaway and I found it to be highly entertaining as well as book after my own heart for a couple of reasons. I am very interested in ancestry and have been doing my own ancestry for quite sometime and was fascinated to learn that Ms.Johnson and I have a common ancestral link... the Capets of France.It was a fascinating account of her family and their Journey to Illinois.
I also found her account of early colonial history very interesting. I recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of genealogy and history.this is a well written ,well researched book and will hold the interest of young and old alike. The author asks many of the same questions we all have about 18th century courtships and how our ancestors met.She also points out how full the lives of our ancestors were in the pioneer days.While her family was settling in Mo line,My family was at the other end of Illinois Settling The Mount Vernon ,Illinois Area. Interesting it was in the same time period and that grabbed my interest right away. I loved that she was able to Draw from Diaries and letters the thoughts and daily accounts of life from her ancestors. She mad the book absolutely jump to life with those excerpts. This book was a page turner from start to finish.
I also found her account of early colonial history very interesting. I recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of genealogy and history.this is a well written ,well researched book and will hold the interest of young and old alike. The author asks many of the same questions we all have about 18th century courtships and how our ancestors met.She also points out how full the lives of our ancestors were in the pioneer days.While her family was settling in Mo line,My family was at the other end of Illinois Settling The Mount Vernon ,Illinois Area. Interesting it was in the same time period and that grabbed my interest right away. I loved that she was able to Draw from Diaries and letters the thoughts and daily accounts of life from her ancestors. She mad the book absolutely jump to life with those excerpts. This book was a page turner from start to finish.
Want to read
February 15, 2016I might enjoy. NYReview is positive [by Francine Post].
CHldhood 1940s in Moline, Ill. on banks of Mississippi.
"What gives her memoir its charm is the tone in which she relates her recollections: as in her novels, the cheerful wry bemusement, the rare combination of optimism and clear-sightedness, the humor and the intelligence we have come to expect from her fictional 1st-person narrators, and from the knowing voice that moves seamlessly from the consciousness of one character to another.
Like her heroines, J appears to have a boundless curiosity about the world and its inhabitants, a quality that prevents her memoir from falling into the traps of solipsism and self-involvement."
"what a sheltered 19thc world Moline still was in the 1940s.....intense desire to escape"
"FAced with the challenges of the exotic world, my dreams of adventre shriveled. I was not up to adventure. With unexpresed misgivings, I went ahead and married my boyfriend and moved to California....[marriage] boiling down to ur not liking each other" Spent time in England, came back to US, then to France.
May be interesting: trilogy set in France [where she lives now]: Le Divorce 1997, Le Mariage 2000, L'affaire 2003/
CHldhood 1940s in Moline, Ill. on banks of Mississippi.
"What gives her memoir its charm is the tone in which she relates her recollections: as in her novels, the cheerful wry bemusement, the rare combination of optimism and clear-sightedness, the humor and the intelligence we have come to expect from her fictional 1st-person narrators, and from the knowing voice that moves seamlessly from the consciousness of one character to another.
Like her heroines, J appears to have a boundless curiosity about the world and its inhabitants, a quality that prevents her memoir from falling into the traps of solipsism and self-involvement."
"what a sheltered 19thc world Moline still was in the 1940s.....intense desire to escape"
"FAced with the challenges of the exotic world, my dreams of adventre shriveled. I was not up to adventure. With unexpresed misgivings, I went ahead and married my boyfriend and moved to California....[marriage] boiling down to ur not liking each other" Spent time in England, came back to US, then to France.
May be interesting: trilogy set in France [where she lives now]: Le Divorce 1997, Le Mariage 2000, L'affaire 2003/
October 25, 2014
I picked this book up because 1) I'm from the Midwest, 2) I love family history, and 3) I heard a semi-favorable review by Maureen Corrigan on NPR. I had not read any of Diane Johnson's fiction or other memoirs, so I had no preconceived notions going into it.
In the end, my opinion is decidedly mixed. I liked the ease of Johnson's prose. Her narrative style was personable and approachable. I also enjoyed learning about her ancestors.
Beyond that, I had some issues. The book seemed disjointed. I'm not sure how the family history fit into the overall narrative. I also had issues with the somewhat derisive way Johnson talked about her hometown and the Midwest, like she was truly better than that life. Now, I'm not a diehard fan of the place where I grew up either, but I also have enough perspective to know it's not all terrible and it's certainly not because I'm better than my roots.
In the end, I found myself simply not liking the author. It wasn't that I hated her outright, more that I found myself thinking "get over yourself already".
I'm kind of curious to read her fiction work, because I liked her storytelling - I just didn't like the storyteller.
In the end, my opinion is decidedly mixed. I liked the ease of Johnson's prose. Her narrative style was personable and approachable. I also enjoyed learning about her ancestors.
Beyond that, I had some issues. The book seemed disjointed. I'm not sure how the family history fit into the overall narrative. I also had issues with the somewhat derisive way Johnson talked about her hometown and the Midwest, like she was truly better than that life. Now, I'm not a diehard fan of the place where I grew up either, but I also have enough perspective to know it's not all terrible and it's certainly not because I'm better than my roots.
In the end, I found myself simply not liking the author. It wasn't that I hated her outright, more that I found myself thinking "get over yourself already".
I'm kind of curious to read her fiction work, because I liked her storytelling - I just didn't like the storyteller.
August 30, 2016
This memoir shuffles back and forth from Moline, IL to the south of France - both areas of the world I have experienced (the former for many formative years, the latter for one heavenly week). So of course I grabbed it off the shelf of the library the other day when I was looking for an audiobook to listen to on my drive to the Quad Cities!
Within her memories of growing up in the Quad Cities, specifically on the Rock Island Arsenal and in Moline, Diane Johnson weaves information from letters, diaries, oral histories and written memoirs of her ancestors ("the family ghosts who shape us") who were some of the first settlers in the ("flyover") Midwest. She also contrasts the past to what she's doing currently in the south of France as a grown-up writer, exploring "the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention."
I enjoyed how she connected information about her own life with ideas gleaned from the people who lived before her. This book spurred me towards an ever-growing interest in my own family history. I wish I knew more about the personalities of my ancestors. How can I find that out?
Within her memories of growing up in the Quad Cities, specifically on the Rock Island Arsenal and in Moline, Diane Johnson weaves information from letters, diaries, oral histories and written memoirs of her ancestors ("the family ghosts who shape us") who were some of the first settlers in the ("flyover") Midwest. She also contrasts the past to what she's doing currently in the south of France as a grown-up writer, exploring "the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention."
I enjoyed how she connected information about her own life with ideas gleaned from the people who lived before her. This book spurred me towards an ever-growing interest in my own family history. I wish I knew more about the personalities of my ancestors. How can I find that out?
May 31, 2014
I received this book as a Goodreads Giveaway.
I'd like to apologize to the author for taking so long to post a review. I had a lot going on around my haven, including a new puppy and that has put me behind on my reading.
This book was a tad different from my regular reading material (which varies). It took me a little while to grow an interest in the book, but as I continued through I began to enjoy it more. Diane Johnson is a wonderful writer and this book shares some of her family history along with stories from various parts of her life. There's a lot of nostalgia in the book that I could relate to despite the generation difference. I most enjoyed the parts about the summer house and teenage years. As she stated, it seems to be more of a travel book and though I struggled in the beginning I am glad that I completed it. I can understand some people's frustration but I don't understand the extremely low ratings. I believe it is worth the read and I appreciate the opportunity to do so.
I'd like to apologize to the author for taking so long to post a review. I had a lot going on around my haven, including a new puppy and that has put me behind on my reading.
This book was a tad different from my regular reading material (which varies). It took me a little while to grow an interest in the book, but as I continued through I began to enjoy it more. Diane Johnson is a wonderful writer and this book shares some of her family history along with stories from various parts of her life. There's a lot of nostalgia in the book that I could relate to despite the generation difference. I most enjoyed the parts about the summer house and teenage years. As she stated, it seems to be more of a travel book and though I struggled in the beginning I am glad that I completed it. I can understand some people's frustration but I don't understand the extremely low ratings. I believe it is worth the read and I appreciate the opportunity to do so.
February 21, 2014
Diane Johnson has written several wonderful French-toned books such as Le Divorce and L'Affaire. I was delighted to be able to read her newest book (I won it in a Goodreads giveaway!). When I began reading the book, I wasn't sure what to expect. Not being familiar with the term "flyover", I thought perhaps it had something to do with Ms. Johnson's travels. In a way it is about travel, as she tells the story of her Midwestern coming-of-age and introduces us to some of her more colorful ancestors. She entwines many family stories throughout her own life and the result is part memoir, part genealogical record.
I believe she could have taken out several of her ancestor's stories and used them separately as a novel, especially Catherine Anne Perkins and her diary entries. This glimpse into life in the 1800's was very interesting and I would have liked to have seen more of it.
All in all, the book was a nice winter book. The tone was informal and I felt as though I were sitting down with the author as she told some stories of her life.
I believe she could have taken out several of her ancestor's stories and used them separately as a novel, especially Catherine Anne Perkins and her diary entries. This glimpse into life in the 1800's was very interesting and I would have liked to have seen more of it.
All in all, the book was a nice winter book. The tone was informal and I felt as though I were sitting down with the author as she told some stories of her life.
January 20, 2016
Disappointing. I’m giving it two stars for some lovely passages in the first half about her pioneer ancestors and her childhood in Moline, Illinois. But in total, the book is uneven and the last half is just Diane Johnson tooting her own horn, and not in a good way. She has some impressive accomplishments, but in the telling, she comes off as selfish and self-aggrandizing. Why didn't her editor give it some focus and polish her image? And why didn’t they rewrite the appalling chapter 38, which begins “When my children were small, I had to put my Uncle Bill in the madhouse.” (A better term than “loony bin” which she uses later, I kid you not.)
She goes on to describe the aunt and uncle who doted on her as a child and later moved to southern California to be near her. When her aunt died suddenly, Uncle Bill, always “high strung”, fell into a depression, and she makes no other case for what behavior forced her to put him in the “madhouse.”
This book is not very memorable . I feel it was in parts that didn't connect very well to me somehow.
She goes on to describe the aunt and uncle who doted on her as a child and later moved to southern California to be near her. When her aunt died suddenly, Uncle Bill, always “high strung”, fell into a depression, and she makes no other case for what behavior forced her to put him in the “madhouse.”
This book is not very memorable . I feel it was in parts that didn't connect very well to me somehow.
February 21, 2014
I was drawn to this book because I too grew up in Moline, although I was not familiar with the author who is older. In the opening chapters, I recognized lots of names including those of teachers & it was fun revisiting landmarks like Black Hawk State Park, the Rock Island Arsenal, the old Le Claire Hotel overlooking the muddy Mississippi & our favorite hangout, Lagomarchino's ice cream parlor.
I must confess to skimming the part about her ancestors. The rest is filled with name-dropping & self-aggrandizing which I found pretentious. I'm happy that she has had a somewhat successful career but she seems condescending of her roots. We all come away with different feelings of our background. And while I also moved away, I loved growing up in Moline, Illinois, "farm implement capital of the world, home of John Deere." I get the feeling that Diane did not. I must say she has great cover art on all her books.
I must confess to skimming the part about her ancestors. The rest is filled with name-dropping & self-aggrandizing which I found pretentious. I'm happy that she has had a somewhat successful career but she seems condescending of her roots. We all come away with different feelings of our background. And while I also moved away, I loved growing up in Moline, Illinois, "farm implement capital of the world, home of John Deere." I get the feeling that Diane did not. I must say she has great cover art on all her books.
March 11, 2014
After having read two of Johnson’s novels which I enjoyed very much, I was disappointed with this history of her family and early childhood. Her stories about her ancestors, derived from letters left by her forebears, are mundane. Johnson admits in her epilogue that her own life lacks drama, yet the more interesting parts of her narrative are when she writes about herself. I would much rather have read more about her experience on film sets, and life as a young mother and scholar in London, than about great great great grandma Perkins. In this instance, her book is appropriately titled—I definitely would have preferred to ‘flyover’ the ancestors and learned more about Johnson herself. I feel like she just skimmed the surface and didn’t give us any of the nitty-gritty. Ms. Johnson definitely is more compelling when she frees her imagination in fiction, than in this literal synopsis of her life.
November 25, 2014
For my tastes Johnson tries to do too many things in one book. The sections about her ancestors settling in the upper Midwest and about her own childhood there were fascinating and detailed, more reminders of how much America has changed in one or two human lifetimes. The accounts of her more recent life, especially her working and hobnobbing with famous movie directors, while impressive, seemed out of place, almost like she was trying to bring the book up to a certain length. The letters from her great grandmother, treasures of self-deprecating bravery, were the highlight. Like the following:
“....I think, maybe, that I am happy, in general, and lucky as well, and I hope this is what most people end up thinking, that the life they have is the best option and that they’ve had a bit of luck.”
“....I think, maybe, that I am happy, in general, and lucky as well, and I hope this is what most people end up thinking, that the life they have is the best option and that they’ve had a bit of luck.”
February 10, 2014
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway, but, alas, it just didn't strike me as a very "good read". This surprised me since the author has won awards for some of her other work, and the subject matter sounded interesting. It really needed some serious editing, and perhaps (since mine was an advance readers' copy) it did receive further editing before publication. Still, the book felt as though the author didn't have enough material on one topic for a whole book, so she threw together a bit of this and that from her memory box. It felt as though she made many discursions, but wasn't able to tie the whole together in any coherent way. I like memoirs, but this one just didn't measure up for me.
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