Flyover Lives: A Memoir [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00H7KX5ZI | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi River and venturing off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her about her Americanness: "Indifference to history. That's why Americans seem so na?ve."
The j'accuse stays with Johnson. Are Americans indifferent to history? Her own family seemed always to have been in the Midwest. Surely they had gotten there from somewhere? In digging around, she discovers letters and memoirs written by generations of her stalwart pioneer ancestors that testify to more complex and fascinating times than the derisive nickname "the Flyover" gives the region credit for. This is the story of the people who struggled to reach places like Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois two hundred years ago and saw no reason to leave.
Johnson weaves passages from these cherished records into her own pages, illuminating the westward journeys shared by so many American families and the bedrock character that enabled them to survive a brutal pioneer period to become the sheltered guardians of Americana in both its best and worst incarnations.
With the acuity and sympathy that her bestselling novels are known for, Johnson captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention. Here is the small-town charm of a midwestern childhood as well as the series of adventures that led to her unlikely situation in France, so far from Moline - yet, as her history reveals, the birthplace of her first ancestor to brave the New World. A dazzling meditation on the mysteries of the "wispy but material" family ghosts who shape us, this spellbinding memoir is also a keenly insightful exploration of how we shape ourselves.
Books with free ebook downloads available Download Flyover Lives: A Memoir
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 4 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: January 16, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00H7KX5ZI
A life’s story need not be heartrending to be interesting, to be memoir-worthy, and bestselling novelist Diane Johnson’s new Flyover Lives is one of those memoirs that proves it.
Flyover Lives is named for the “flyover states,” the seemingly undramatic U.S. Midwest that Johnson’s ancestors helped settle, states that today are not destinations, but distant landscapes we disregard at 30,000 feet. Johnson’s book, though, is a detour that allows us to land and visit with her and generations past, read from their journals, learn of their pioneering successes and failures, their loves and losses. Even her childhood home of then small town Moline, Illinois becomes a character who warrants a front porch visit, a little fat chewing, simply because people were born and grew up and died there. They went to the movies in Moline, in 1945, and saw newsreel war images that stayed with them, making them grateful that they didn’t know what real suffering is. They were embarrassed by their father’s quirky underwear there, and learned to love their aunts and uncles. They left there to go to college, find themselves, marry and divorce, and move halfway across the country, then partway around the world, and learn that they can’t ever really leave.
Examined thoughtfully, these lives are interesting, Johnson’s and her family’s, and she reveals them with a respectful and often humorous narrative that makes them seem familiar.
At 80, Diane Johnson has a lifetime of accomplishments as a writer: numerous novels, a finalist in the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, essays, a dozen screenplays and now an unusual memoir to say the least. Raised in Moline, after graduating from Stephens College in Missouri, she received an internship at Mademoiselle in New York and from there spent her life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Paris.
Diane captured the isolated comfort of growing up in small city Midwest, the routine, the family-centricity, the somewhat passivity, the excellent education, and to some extent the stress of small-town economic dependency, a subtle favoritism that falls just shy of economic coercion.
But that’s the second half of the book. In the first half, she traces her ancestry from a French soldier who landed in pre-revolutionary Connecticut. She focuses the story on his descendent, Catharine Anne, who became a school teacher in small-town Vermont, marries and moves to Illinois in the 1820’s. Catharine kept journals then wrote a memoir in her 70’s, which every modern writer yearns for in order to write an historical, emotional narrative. Catharine’s story weaves the trauma of a New England small-town woman who followed her husband into the frontier and chronicles the despair that finally caused her to question her marriage and the control she had over her life, both with man and God. The death of her first three children, aged 5, 3, and 1 within a two-week period from Scarlet Fever, will tear out your soul trying to understand the purpose of life.
Diane Johnson follows parallel themes in the two halves of the book: a woman’s desire to pursue her dreams, to bear a family, to determine her life and support her husband’s journey.
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