Melanie Benjamin certainly has writability as is shown in her recently published,
The Aviator's Wife. This historical fiction is based on the life of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, herself known for writability in her classic,
Gift from the Sea.
Benjamin's easy, yet informative read, gives much insight into the once shy daughter of a US ambassador and her very complicated marriage to Charles Lindbergh, once the "darling" of our nation. It tells of that time in our country's history which my parents knew all about. I, not so much----thus my interest in the book.
Well-written. Yes.....but, with it came disclosures of fears and struggles that Mrs. Lindbergh kept from prying eyes. Supposedly she and Charles carefully edited her diaries near the end of his life so.....it probably wasn't the perfect little marriage, which was the public's perception.
Ms Benjamin says The Aviator's Wife is primarily the story of a deeply intelligent woman. A woman of resilience. A woman who lived in the shadow of her husband.
As historical fiction, apart from the well-known actual people, events and locales presented....all else are used fictitiously by the author. The kidnapping and murder of their 20 month old son, Lindbergh's heroic flight of 1927, infidelity, other children of Charles as later DNA evidence proved, his comments interpreted as anti-semitic during the prelude of WWII, and his 1953 Pulitzer Prize winning, The Spirit of St. Louis are all documented events.
The author includes these facts but then weaves in the emotional aspect of this mystifying marriage in order to tell Anne's story. Fiction and reality blurred, but the story is told from adventures in flying as her husband's only crew to praying as she finally began to write, lingering over words as she searched for imagery.....trying to look at the world through her own goggles, not his.
Words of truth or fiction---as written by the author:
- What do you want to do? Marry a hero. (Lucky Lindy was America's hero.)
- I would always be looking for that proud glance; that feeling of belonging, of knowing who I was and that I mattered, for the rest of my life.
- Always the image of the of a child and a birthday cake with one candle....."No Anne. We need to forget."
- To my children, I was just mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles wife, the bereaved mother of a slain child. That was all.
- He spent much of his time working on some engine or another....not emotions; something he could understand.
- When he was home, the air in the house was so impenetrable with tension....had to retreat to breathe.
- Marriage breeds its own special brand of loneliness.
One with writability provides us with a cuppa readabili-TEA---though sometimes we must read with care if we hope to extract God's lessons from a book with the cultural reality of our times!
