Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice (review)

b o o k R e v ie w s 221 Unlearning to Fly. By Jennifer Brice. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 202 pages, $24-95. Reviewed by Eric Heyne University of Alaska Fairbanks Unlearning to Fly is a collection of essays that comprise a memoir about growing up in Alaska. In her preface, Jennifer Brice says she “rarely tell[s] people that [she’s] from Alaska” and even flies “to and from Alaska incognito” to avoid being seduced into playing the role of local expert by eager tourists (xiv, xv). Brice may feel exotic living in the East as a transplanted Alaskan, but I suspect many readers will relate to her account of what it feels like to grow up in a remote, small town in the West. Her memoir begins with an account of the 1964 Good Friday earth­ quake, the largest ever recorded in North America, which she was too small to remember but recounts from family lore. Much of the first long chapter, in fact, describes events in her parents’ lives before she was bom, giving Brice a chance to demonstrate the skills she developed working in journalism and writ­ ing her first book, The Last Settlers (1998), about homesteaders in the 1980s. She achieves a nice balance between crisp description and a more subjective child’s perspective on family dynamics. Her chapter “Wild Music: Reflections on Big Oil and Innocence” gives us a firsthand look at the last thirty years of oil politics in Alaska—from before construction of the pipeline to after the Exxon Valdez spill—from the intimately disinterested perspective of a “tree-hugger with a sense of complexity” (64). Brice’s stoicism is never uncaring, but she does not suffer fools (either pro-environment or pro-development) gladly. For me, the later chapters of Unlearning to Fly were especially absorbing, as the focus begins to deepen around the topic of flying. Working in the shadow of the romantic aura surrounding the stereotype of the Alaskan bush pilot, an aura that is even stronger in Alaska than in the Lower 48, Brice manages to make even this risk-averse, late-middle-aged man feel the pull of piloting. Luckily for my family, she’s even better at communicating the risks. Flying is always a gamble; every ascent must reckon with the “Angle of Attack,” as she titles a chapter on crashes (and in particular on the death of a close friend). This chapter is also where she addresses most directly the central questions of memoir: how and why to write honestly about ourselves and those around us (another kind of “angle of attack”). Flying is compared to any number of things in this book, including writ­ ing of course, but the actual experience in the cockpit is always at the center of those comparisons. I am persuaded that Brice’s metaphors are never forced, her honesty never compromised. She observes that “describing other lives, the best writers—the wisest ones—help us enter our own more deeply” (200). Unlearning to Fly made me think more deeply about the skills I have learned and unlearned, the stories by which my life is patched together and launched into the world. ...