When She Flew
By Jennie Shortridge
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Published November 3, 2009 (Paperback) NAL Trade Original Edition
More Info: Jennie Shortridge
Minor disclaimer. Jennie and I are friends. But we didn’t become friends until I interviewed her about her earlier book Riding With the Queen, and we discovered a kinship we described as being life-long members – and therefore sisters – in the Crazy Mothers Club. A club, needless to say, of our own invention. Not meant to be funny, as Jennie pointed out today on my show, Open Book with Diana Page Jordan. But the shared pain has led us each to richer lives than we could have ever imagined. This book, too, When She Flew, is about mothers and daughters, and fathers and daughters.
More than that, it is a warmhearted fictionalized account of a news story that gripped us - as news media – and everyone else. A peak athlete had been running through Forest Park in Portland, crashing through brush and unmarked trails, and happened upon a clearing in the woods that was obviously a home. It turned out to be the real home of a Vietnam Vet and his prepubescent daughter. While that scenario – seen through my own filter of having been raped as a toddler, for years by the man who was my stepfather – gave me chills, it turns out young Ruth was extremely well cared for. And, that prompted the sergeant on the case to try to keep father and daughter together. Jennie tells in our interview how in her story developed into a female officer who, likewise, breaks the rules, and the trouble she encounters – by thinking as a mom – as a result.
In this story, the father is an Iraq War veteran, and his daughter, Lindy, at twelve, is a few years older than Ruth. Lindy is into birds. Ruth’s mom was institutionalized, that’s as specific as Jennie knows. And, Ruth, as a kid, read at a twelfth grade level.
Unusual upbringings impact us. As members of the “Crazy Mother’s Club” – Jennie and me, and maybe Ruth, too – we all try extra hard to make sense of it. And, Jennie does, in When She Flew.
