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Flyover Lives: A Memoir, by Diane Johnson
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“[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711.
As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention.
- Sales Rank: #1492927 in Books
- Published on: 2014-11-25
- Released on: 2014-11-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .57" w x 5.30" l, .49 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
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
“[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.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Delightful . . . compelling and entertaining. . . . [Johnson's] storytelling brings [the] past vividly to life.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Lovely writing . . . [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
“Johnson seeks to understand how [her family] history has shaped her character, and . . . 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
“Adeptly structured, incisive, funny, and charming . . . Keenly observed.”
—Booklist
About the Author
Diane Johnson grew up in Moline, Illinois. She now lives in San Francisco and Paris.
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Poignancy, insight and humor
By kbgressitt
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. In particular, if you are Caucasian, middle class and born between the two world wars through the baby boomer years, you will recognize the more recent of these flyover lives in their details: Saturday double features, the dress-up box, learning to use Tampons—not the pads mothers recommended, college as a stepping stone to marriage, the ability to transcend the 1950s and become a different kind of woman.
Flyover Lives has none of the titillating trauma of many memoirs. What it has is a subtle poignancy, a gentle narrative of insightful, tender storytelling by a writer who seems to honor her family’s past as much as her present, the quirkiness and mundanity, the misadventures and achievements, with a sense that the people now gone had stories that went with them, stories we would have liked to hear.
19 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Gut Wrenching Emotion Overshadowed by Elitist Arrogance
By Steven C. Hull
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. But with her passage from provincial life to cosmopolitan, Diane becomes a French socialist-democrat, denigrating the small-town America rotarianism and embracement of religion (“religious fervor … comes and goes like seasonal flu, and each time leaves a nation weakened for the next attack.”). She extols the virtues of trains and considers France (“There is somewhere better than America to live … anyone who has lived in the better places knows it’s true.”) a far greater society to live in than the U.S. with its guns and disgusting right-wing Republicans. Then she spends the last few chapters talking about every celebrity in Hollywood she had lunch with.
I love Paris and Venice too, and New York and Los Angeles, but I also appreciate Des Moines and Iowa City. While Diane damns America’s failure to appreciate foreign cultures, she does the same thing toward America. Unfortunately her grumpy old left-wing intolerance of American culture and constant denigration of religion ruins an excellent portrait examining the early nineteenth-century woman’s emotional struggle with death and determinism compared with the twentieth-century woman’s struggle with modernism.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Loved the first part of the book.
By Robert C. Mooney
Starts out very interesting.Then it loses it's focus on flyover states and becomes a story of Diane Johnson's success.
It is like 2 books but I wanted more info about life in the fly over states.
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