Flight Fascination Jane Mendelsohn’s Curiosity About Amelia Earhart’s Last Journey Leads To A Best-Selling Novel

A funny thing happened to Jane Mendelsohn on the way to the best-seller list.

Radio talk jock Don Imus, of all people, fell in love with her lyrical, literary first novel, “I Was Amelia Earhart” (Knopf, $18), and started plugging it and plugging it on his syndicated show.

Imus’ listeners started buying it and buying it.

“I Was Amelia Earhart,” which was launched with a respectable but by no-means blockbuster first printing of 30,000 copies in April, soared onto the best-seller list in early May, where it has remained. There are now more than 230,000 copies in print. Movie rights have been sold, and Vintage Books just paid six figures to publish the paperback.

How has Mendelsohn, who once couldn’t even get a literary agent, adjusted to her pinch-me-am-I-dreaming success?

“It’s great, but it’s definitely unsettling,” says the 30-year-old as she sips tea and nibbles a muffin during an interview at an eatery in New Haven, Conn. “It’s fantastic that people are reading the book, but all the attention is kind of weird for me.”

Mendelsohn lives in Greenwich Village with her husband, filmmaker Nick Davis. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale University (majoring in English) in 1987 and gave Yale Law School a go for a year before dropping out.

Determined to become a writer, Mendelsohn headed back to New York, where she grew up on the Upper West Side, the daughter of a psychiatrist father and an art historian mother. She rented a room in Hoboken, N.J., and began writing “I Was Amelia Earhart,” a poetic riff on the famous aviator’s final flight.

Mendelsohn’s imagination was sparked by a 1992 article in The New York Times about the apparent discovery of fragments of Earhart’s plane on a deserted Pacific island. Earhart was last heard from on July 2, 1937, as she attempted to circumnavigate the globe with her navigator, Fred Noonan.

“I never had known that she had a navigator,” Mendelsohn says. “I thought, oh, two people flying around the world together and disappearing. How romantic.”

During her research, Mendelsohn quickly discovered that Noonan was a womanizer and an alcoholic. How the self-sufficient Earhart copes with Noonan’s drinking and his fears and eventually succumbs to his charms after they crash on a desert island is what propels Mendelsohn’s self-described “fairy tale.” (There’s also the chance that the entire book is Earhart’s last fantasy as she plummets to her death. Mendelsohn says she wants it both ways.)

The first draft of “Amelia Earhart” was written in the third person, but Mendelsohn wasn’t happy with it. She wanted something more personal and immediate, so she began writing in the first person, as Earhart. In finding Earhart’s voice, Mendelsohn discovered her own. The final version of the short novel - only 146 pages - alternates between the first and third person.

The very first line - “The sky is flesh” - signals that “Amelia Earhart” is a writerly book.

“I wanted to point out right away that this book is about language as much as a story about Amelia Earhart,” says Mendelsohn, who published poetry in university publications while at Yale.

Finally happy with what she had written, Mendelsohn began sending the “Earhart” manuscript to literary agents and found nothing but rejection. The novel was either too short, too literary or not commercial enough. Then, on the recommendation of a friend, she sent her book to Ann Close, an editor at Knopf. Close’s assistant picked it out of the slush pile and recommended it to her boss.

Knopf bought the book for a modest advance, gave it a healthy first printing for a debut literary novel by an unknown and even invited a group of book sellers to dine with the young author.

Then came Imus. Most major newspapers and magazines hadn’t even had a chance to review the book when Imus’ wife, Deirdre Coleman, bought it out of curiosity. She asked her husband to read it, and on April 22 he began raving about it on the air.

Mendelsohn got a call at home from her father that Imus was talking about her book. Her immediate thought: “He must be making fun of it.”

He wasn’t. Good reviews from such prominent venues as The New York Times and The New Yorker (“a flash of silver in the leaden skies of contemporary fiction”) didn’t hurt, either. (A few naysayers, such as Newsweek, have called Mendelsohn’s prose pretentious.)

Good publicity begets good publicity, and even People magazine has jumped on the “Earhart” bandwagon, offering a feature story on Mendelsohn this month.

Mendelsohn is now on a book tour.

She still seems a bit stunned by all the hoopla but thinks no small part of her success is because of our enduring fascination with Earhart. “She was a visionary,” Mendelsohn says.