NINA MURRAY/For the Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Friday, November 23, 2007 6:00 pm
(“Unlearning to Fly” by Jennifer Brice, University of Nebraska Press, $24.95). The Scoop: If you live in Alaska, you fly. If you’re born in Alaska, like Jennifer Brice, you fly in an airplane before you ride in a taxi. If your father is a tireless contractor clearing Arctic forests for roads and runways, like Brice’s; if he wakes you before dawn on school days to take you along for a flight to a remote site; and if he asks you what you want to be when you grow up, doesn’t it seem natural to say, a pilot? Brice’s memoir in essays charts precisely this route from birth through childhood, to adulthood, to flying solo over the awesome and uncompromising land. More essentially, though, this book is a map of the many illusions by which we organize our lives, the most important of which is the illusion of dying, the sense of toeing the line no man can cross, and peering over.
The Hook: Despite her father’s will, Jennifer Brice’s mother, the daughter of a Harvard-educated surgeon, became a nurse, a questionable vocation for a well-born woman in 1950s America. Despite common expectations, she took a two-year post in Fairbanks, a town she drove through and missed at the time. So, perhaps, began the family’s courtship of the extreme, the same lust for utter “being” that would lead Brice to river rapids, cliff edges, and ultimately, the open skies — frequently despite her own instincts.
What’ll keep you reading: Brice’s careful exploration of the contours and sources of her compulsion towards what is normally called risk. Like a pilot photographing terrain for a map, she captures her family (eccentric, divided, but always game) and friends in a broad and clear vision. Each time she returns to the same theme — imagining her father’s death when his plane breaks off contact, grieving for a friend who does die in a plane crash, surviving a brush with deadly negligence herself — the details rush towards you clear, overwhelming and inevitable.
When it soars: When Brice heeds her own opinion that the best memoirs speak only accidentally about their authors. Indeed, every person who graces the pages of her narrative, is writ generously, fairly and kindly, with a fascination that rekindles our own sense of wonder at the lives we think we know most intimately— those of our parents, close friends, co-workers, but also the collective lives of our homes and our environment. To write about real people’s experiences, Brice says, “feels like being in the business of stealing souls, of being a tourist in other people’s lives.” An apt metaphor for someone who writes from and about Alaska — a place most people experience only as tourists.
Where it stumbles: The organization of the narrative as a collection of independent essays means that occasionally there are gaps and omissions. The reader is required to allow the overarching story of the author’s life to travel in and out of focus, occasionally completely obscured by an event intensely lived by someone else. In the end the omissions and incongruities, the gaps in the stories will not detract from the book’s impact.
When to pick it up: Ideally, after taking a few flying lessons. A kayaking session will do almost as well. The chapter on the oil boom is an excellent primer to any encounter with Alaska, and the other essays are invaluable for adventures like growing up, becoming a mother, or even growing roses.
Nina Murray is a writer and translator in Lincoln.