FLYOVER LIVES: A Memoir by Diane Johnson (review)

Describing the arrival of Diane Johnson’s ancestors from Europe to the Midwest, tracing her passage from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, and revealing glimpses of the incidents that led to her current transatlantic personal and professional life, Flyover Lives consists of the elements of history, autobiography, and travel.

“Americans are naïve and indifferent to history” (3), the remark made by Johnson’s French hostess, fueled her curiosity about her family history, and she discovered in the papers of her great-great grandmother Catherine Anne Perkins Martin that in 1711 her forefathers, the brothers René and François Cossé, had been captured by the English on board a ship en route to Canada. Subsequently, René Cossé (Ranna Cossitt) remained in Connecticut, refusing to be sent to Montreal in exchange for the English prisoners of the French taken during the Anglo-French rivalry over Canada. In 1820, Catherine’s mother Anne Cossitt, Ranna’s great granddaughter and Johnson’s great-great-great grandmother, married a man called Meyrick and went to the Midwest, which Johnson identifies as the “flyover country.”

Depicting personal, familial, and social history with an episodic plot, Diane Johnson’s memoir calls to mind A Backward Glance (1934), the autobiography of Edith Wharton, another fin de siècle American writer in Paris. Unlike her literary predecessor’s transatlantic residence, however, that of Johnson resulted from her second husband’s professional obligation rather than her own preference. Different from those of the earlier writer too, Johnson’s recollections reveal an unexceptional childhood. Her father, a high school principal, and her mother, an art teacher, used to be “great readers” (49), who introduced the classics to their daughter at home and in Carnegie Library in Moline, the author’s hometown.

All along, Johnson maintains an unassuming attitude to her distinctive accomplishments. In contrast to Sylvia Plath, who poignantly imparted in her novel The Bell Jar (1963) her internship at Mademoiselle magazine in New York in summer 1953, Johnson nearly mutes her attainment of a similar position at this magazine in the same summer. This script-writer of Stanley Kubrick’s well-acclaimed movie The Shining neither magnifies her collaboration with the distinguished Hollywood directors Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola, Sydney Pollack, and Volker Schlöndorff, nor dwells on her long-established literary career. She even plays down the successful filming of her novel Le Divorce by James Ivory.

Johnson names Uncle Bill as her favorite relative and emphasizes the hardships endured by her ancestral aunt Catherine’s husband, Dr. Eleazer Martin, while searching for a suitable place to practice his medical profession, which also happens to be the profession of Johnson’s brother and husband. Even so, she considers such tasks of women as canning, quilting, and painting more fascinating, albeit less challenging. Indeed, Johnson emerges as a veritable feminist, as she claims, “like any nice woman I am a feminist” (122), not only for probing her maternal lineage for her roots, but also for plucking the courage after her divorce from her first husband in 1968 and taking her four little children with her to London to do research and write in the British Museum.