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From Booklist
The author of shrewd and scintillating novels about Americans abroad, Johnson (L’Affaire, 2003; Lulu in Marrakech, 2008) grew up in Moline, Illinois, “A pleasant place, surrounded by cornfields, I had always longed to get out of.” And so she did, as she crisply and wittily recounts in this stealthily far-reaching family history. Johnson’s personal story gains resonance in harmony with a remarkable set of memoirs written by her great-great-great grandmother, Anne, born in 1779, and Anne’s daughter, Catharine, a teacher who, after a tortuous nine-year engagement, married a doctor only to endure his depression and long absences and the deaths of all but one of her nine children. Johnson perceives that her skilled and strong foremothers lived daunting yet satisfyingly “useful lives.” Adeptly structured, incisive, funny, and charming, Johnson’s look back delves into deep questions of history and inheritance, from the impact of America’s many wars on the Midwest to the transforming changes in modern women’s lives to her own adventures as a novelist and screenwriter raising a large, blended family, living overseas, and keenly observing cultural differences, personal quirks, and timeless commonalities. --Donna Seaman
Review
Praise for Flyover Lives by Diane Johnson:
“[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. Johnson strikes an elegiac note in her cullings of family and national history . . . splendid.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Smart and engaging . . . [A] singularly agreeable and appealing book.”
—The Washington Post
“Smart . . . perceptive . . . Flyover Lives is a memoir of the Midwest sure to charm readers . . . Johnson vividly reminds us that the country we’re all from is the unfamiliar one called the past.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Delightful . . . compelling and entertaining. . . . Johnson has a sharp eye for detail, and . . . her storytelling brings [the] past vividly to life.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Solid Midwestern values seasoned by charm, affection, and lovely writing provide a welcome detour off the tabloid [memoir] path. . . . [It’s an] absolute pleasure [to be] in the company of a skilled writer who so eloquently examines the people and geography that shaped her.”
—Boston Globe
“Like her heroines, Johnson appears to have a boundless curiosity about the world and its inhabitants . . . What gives her memoir its charm and makes it so consistently beguiling is . . . the tone in which she relates her recollections, reflections, and discoveries. Fans of her novels will recognize 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 first-person narrators, and from the knowing voice that moves seamlessly from the consciousness of one character to another.”
—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books
“Johnson seeks to understand how [her family] history has shaped her character, and when she describes her time as a screenwriter and a young mother with four children in nineteen-sixties England, her cheerful pragmatism and unsparing work ethic do seem tied to the can-do spirit of her ancestors.”
—The New Yorker
“Charming.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Engaging and filled with feeling for an America that is gone forever.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Diane Johnson’s wry new memoir is an absorbing exploration of the people and places that have shaped her. . . . By investigating the lives of her ancestors, Johnson finds that there are no ‘flyover’ lives, and that every person has a story worth telling.”
—BookPage
“Johnson is a felicitous writer, cheerfully alert to irony and absurdity. The unfailing deftness of the prose makes this book a pleasure.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Adeptly structured, incisive, funny, and charming, Johnson’s look back delves into deep questions of history and inheritance. . . . Keenly observed.”
—Booklist
“Award-winning novelist and essayist Diane Johnson explores her Midwestern roots and family history in this charming and candid memoir. . . . An enjoyable peek into how America shaped one celebrated author’s consciousness.”
—Publishers Weekly
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