I met a few former stewardesses at a Pan Am Historical Foundation event at the Eero Saarinen TWA terminal at JFK Airport (before it became a hotel). Here she shares her thoughts on air travel, past and present, and offers some suggestions for making your own glamour when you take to the skies.Īs an avid traveler and travel writer, how did you get interested in writing this particular story? To come back home and start reading about it and to realize the extent to which so many other people didn’t necessarily appreciate that about it, or didn’t respect that-the place resisted understanding, and so people seemed to be imposing their storyline onto it.Julia Cooke’s Come Fly the World gives readers a bird’s-eye view of the gritty, global history of Pan Am and its iconic flight attendants. It was really nice to not be expected to understand it in a way.
When I was there, the sense of being submerged in something that couldn’t be fully understood was incredibly appealing.
That’s what I found so interesting: the fact that we are so insistent on trying to understand Easter Island. On the appeal of the mystery of Rapa Nui: That tends to be what inspires most of my work. And what I found was a lot of contradictions, which is often what I start with when writing: that sense of disjunction between sources, or a lack of consensus, or a disjunction between what I experience and what I read about after leaving a place.
When I came back from Rapa Nui, I started reading about it. She also discusses the island’s complicated and unknowable history, her earlier work as a journalist, and her latest book, which chronicles stories from Pan Am stewardesses during the Jet Age. In this conversation, Julia talks about her trip to Rapa Nui, commonly known as Easter Island, a place famous for the mysterious moai statues that dot the remote landscape. Julia Cooke speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “ Past and Future on Rapa Nui,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue.
0 kommentar(er)
