Flyover lives, by Diane Johnson

Johnson grew up not far from here, in Moline, Illinois, one of the “quad cities” on the Mississippi.  Like many born and bred in the “flyover states,” she could hardly wait to leave.  As her life, lived primarily in Paris and California winds down, she revisits her youth and begins to explore her ancestors’ lives, aided by some old letters and journals.  Raised in the forties and early fifties, she chronicles her own experiences as well, including her summer in New York as one of the Mademoiselle's junior editors, where Sylvia Plath was the star.  She was married before twenty and the mother of four not long afterwards.  The book is a curious kind of memoir mixing her genealogical research, her childhood and teenage years, and then jumping into a couple of chapters that feel thrown in to show just how far she came from downstate Illinois.  I knew her work primarily through Lesser lives, a fascinating look at the women who were the associated with some famous male authors of the Victorian period and which came out during the early years of the feminist movement.   I didn’t know her other novels and biographies, nor that she had written the screenplay for The Shining, and worked with Kubrick, Coppola, and Nichols.  But the random insertion of these name-dropping chapters towards the end takes away from the assumed thesis of her book.  263 pp.