The Beatrice Interview: Jane Mendelsohn (1997)

Jane Mendelsohn spent two and a half years writing I Was Amelia Earhart. When it was released in hardcover in 1996, even its publisher expected it to be just another small literary novel that might gain some critical accolades but would probably get lost in the shuffle. They never expected that one of the people to pick it up off a bookstore counter would be the wife of radio personality Don Imus, who loved the book so much that she gave it to her husband, who spent several days praising the book on his nationally syndicated show. Sales quickly skyrocketed, and soon Mendelsohn was being written up in People and scrambling on a hastily organized book tour. I caught up with her during the much more relaxed tour for the paperback release, where Mendelsohn was able to look back a bit more reflectively at the last year.

You never expected any of this to happen, did you?

No, I definitely didn’t. I had a hard time getting the book published, so I didn’t think that it would turn out to be the bestseller that it did. I had sent it out to several agents who had told me that it was unsellable. So when it finally came out, I was very surprised, and almost traumatic, really.

You’ve talked a little bit in earlier interviews about the process of writing this story.

The first time through, which took me about two years to research and write, was all in the third person. It was still this story, but written more in the voice of a traditional historical novel. I was never very happy with it, thinking all along that it wasn’t the voice that I wanted for this book. I toyed with putting it in the first person, but at the time I didn’t know how to do it and thought that it would be phony. When I got to the end, I felt that I didn’t like it in the third person, but I also felt that I finally understood the story enough to know how to tell it in the first person. I knew what I wanted to say, and had been on this journey, and so I could go back and write the story in my voice.

Was Amelia Earhart somebody that had fascinated you before you wrote this story?

No, not at all. I guess I was interested in her as an American heroine, but I wasn’t interested in the specifics of her life. I wasn’t a buff. Then I came across an article that mentioned that she had a navigator, which I hadn’t known. And the relationship between two people flying around the world and disappearing seemed much more interesting to me than one person. It seemed to have so much more possibility. From there, I started to think about her and her mystery, and the fact that her disappearance had made her this great figure. She was dead but still alive, and I wanted the book to have that kind of uncanny tension.

There’s that fascination that your story addresses: we want to know what happened to her.

You want to finish the story, you want to know, but you can’t know.

With everything that’s happened since the release, what pressures have been put on you as you work on your next book?

It’s definitely been a high pressure time, and very exciting. In the immediate present, there’s been a kind of pressure to perform. In terms of the future, that pressure I feel mostly coming from other people, not from me. I wasn’t trying to write a big successful book when I wrote this, so I won’t try to do that in the future. In some ways, I feel that now that I’ve had this experience, I don’t have to try to have it anymore. So I hope that I can approach the next book with a free state of mind.

Even with that pressure from other people, the chance that they might say, “This isn’t the Jane Mendelsohn book that we were expecting.”

I don’t know that there’s any way to avoid that, because I don’t want to write the same kind of book again.

In fact, you’ve been working on some very different projects since this book.

I’ve been sketching out the next book, and then I’ve been working on a film, a horror movie. That’s been coming along pretty well, although I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to work on it. I think I’ve put a lot of my feelings about this experience into it. It’s also about, although in a very different way than I Was Amelia Earhart, the lines between fantasy and reality.

How soon after getting out of school did you set your sights on becoming a writer?

I was writing. I wrote poetry in college. I finished college in 1987, went to New York and worked for the Village Voice as an assistant to the literary editor and wrote book reviews. Then I went to law school, dropped out after a year, and stayed in New Haven where I wrote book reviews and tutored an undergraduate writing course for a couple semesters. It was in 1992 that I started writing this book, by which time I’d moved to Hoboken. So it took me a few years to finally find a story that I wanted to spend what I knew would be a long time writing.

Do you envision all your projects as taking that much time to fully realize?

I do think so. It would be nice if they didn’t take so long, but I think the ideas that I have will always probably take that long before I’m happy with the way they turn out.

I get the impression that you’re a very meticulous writer.

The process of writing this book was excruciating until I knew it so well that I felt that the last time through the story would be great. And that’s how I work; I want to know my stories inside and out.