She disappeared forever, seemingly, after a transmission on July 2, 1937. But Amelia Earhart is back. With the aviatrix currently on the big screen in Mira Nair's Amelia, and with new conjectures about her disappearance surfacing, these are favorable conditions for Chandra Prasad's Breathe the Sky, a fictional rendering of major events in Earhart's life and career.

The dramatic focus of the novel, indeed half its length, is a tour de force presentation of her fatal attempt to circle the globe. Having learned Earhart made a visit to New Haven shortly before that flight, Prasad gave the famed pilot a cameo in her earlier novel On Borrowed Wings, set at Yale, where Earhart speaks in Woolsey Hall. Prasad "continued to read about her out of personal curiosity," soon "had a miniature Earhart library" next to her desk, and planned to "write about [Earhart] on a larger scale."

Prasad initially set out to write a novel balancing Earhart's presence with fictional women of the period influenced by Earhart, but found, in writing, that Earhart's story was "simply bigger, grander, and more dramatic." And, as Prasad notes, "Earhart tends to experience a marked surge in popularity every decade or so. It has been this way ever since she disappeared."

So the challenge became how to make her own distinct version of Earhart's story, "an ode to Amelia."

In focusing on Earhart, Breathe the Sky brings us into her consciousness, shaping the relationships in the book — particularly with husband George Putnam, and with Fred Noonan, her navigator on the final flight — through Earhart's point of view. And yet there are nice novelistic touches outside Earhart's perspective, such as views of the heroine as seen by the Putnams — George, his first wife Dorothy, their son David — when she stays at their grand home in Rye, N.Y. And late in the book there's a memorable glimpse of Noonan's final hours. Indeed, Prasad invests Noonan with a certain stalwart pathos. He is the person closest to Earhart in her bid to circle the globe, but seems never completely simpatico with his demanding boss. He is also the one person to share her uncertain fate.

To give us Earhart, Prasad must also give us the rigors of aviation at the time, but without bogging her narrative in too much technical detail. She keeps everything rolling along, much as Earhart herself seemed to do. In Prasad's hands, Earhart is neither a daredevil nor a stickler for caution. She operates on instinct, on talent, and on a belief in herself and in her equipment. Aviation and Earhart's love for it dominate the book.

At times, we might almost say flying becomes a metaphor for a woman's effort to set herself apart from the reigning expectations facing women at the time. Or we might try to see Earhart as, to use a potent phrase the narrator lets fall when estimating what captured the public's attention, "an entire nation's raw potential poured into female form." But whenever we might be tempted to read Earhart as a symbol, Prasad brings us back to the logistical problems facing her heroine — whether flight paths, fueling problems, or the many projects her husband G. P. uses her fame to promote.

We find that living at risk, by courage and skill, is a heroic calling, but also an exhausting one, taking its toll on relationships, and even on Earhart's ability to see herself, on the ground, as anything other than the sum total of her fame and her flights. Only in the air is she herself.

The novel provides a gritty, unglamorized, or as Prasad says, "resolutely unsentimental" account of a unique and determined woman who succeeded, though not without misgivings and set-backs, on an unprecedented scale in a dangerous and exciting field.

Novels are, for Prasad, "daring, creative ventures ... meant to take readers to places they didn't expect to go." Breathe the Sky takes us into the cramped space of that Lockheed Electra, and then into a do-or-die situation on the last leg of that journey, trying to reach tiny Howland Island. It's a trip you'll be glad to have made with her.

Donald Brown is a regular contributor to the New Haven Review.

Prasad's Prose Soars With New Earhart Novel

Conn. Author Tells Tale Of Pioneering Aviator

In her fifth book, "Breathe the Sky," author Chandra Prasad bridges the past to the present, fusing sparse historical data with her own imagination to give rise to a novel about one of America's greatest mysteries and most celebrated women, Amelia Earhart.
Prasad, a Hamden resident, breathes new life into the life of her heroine, exploring her drive and ambition, her triumphs and failures. Prasad also offers her own theory regarding Earhart's 1937 disappearance, which comes at the conclusion of "Breathe the Sky," lending the air of a mystery yarn to the novel.
Prasad delivers what few facts are known about the last few months leading up to Earhart's disappearance in the opening chapters, outlining Earhart's first botched attempt a few years earlier to journey across the globe and offering those unfamiliar with the pilot's story a glimpse into the pilot's agile mind and her steely resolve.
But Prasad is quick to stress the fictional liberties she took with "Breathe the Sky."
"If you want a good biography, there are some good ones, but it's not ['Breathe the Sky']," said Prasad.
Instead, Prasad's imagination and conjecture guide the reader to recall an historical figure while at the same time inviting readers to draw their own conclusion as to Earhart's fate. Her disappearance is still shrouded in mystery and captures the imagination seven decades after its occurrence.
Prasad said that part of the springboard for "Breathe the Sky" is tied to a scene in one of Prasad's prior books, "On Borrowed Wings," in which Earhart makes a brief appearance and inspires the book's protagonist.
"The impact [of Earhart's appearance in the prior book] on 'Breathe the Sky' is great," Prasad said.
The book takes more than sidelong glance at Earhart's love life, highlighting that Earhart was not only a maverick of aviation, but that her independent streak followed Earhart into matters of the heart.
This plotline acts as a backdrop to the main theme of Earhart's rise to fame, revealing a woman for whom love took a backseat to her flying.
Prasad's own multi-ethnic background – her father is Indian and her mother carries a mixture of Italian, Swedish and English heritages – makes her "very interested in getting below the surface … and [exploring] what makes people tick."
Prasad said she is drawn as a writer to iconic women, "characters that do their own thing" and break the traditional molds of gender, race and class, she said. However, Prasad said she uses the character as an example of a powerful historical figure, placing more emphasis on Earhart as a pioneer than as a woman.
The idea for writing "Breathe the Sky" evolved from the intersection of Prasad's personal taste in characters (both fictional and nonfictional) and the technique of using a minor character from one of her previous books as the basis for the next.
Prasad has a 2-year-old son, Nikhil, whose tender age at the time at the time Prasad was writing, greatly impacted her writing process, she said.
Prasad estimates she wrote "Breathe the Sky" in just under two years, at "full-throttle" pace. Pregnant with Nikhil at the time of the historical research phase of the book, the baby was born by the time the author sat down to begin the writing process. Prasad says her time became divided after having her son, and attributes the episodic nature of the book to the hectic home life that paralleled her writing schedule.
"Every day kind of felt like an adventure for me," Prasad said.
When balancing motherhood with being a full-time author began to feel too frenetic, Prasad found inspiration in Earhart's unyielding spirit while maintaining a pragmatic view of her own situation.
"What's a little sleep to me here or there, when Amelia would have to go 36 hours without sleep?" Prasad said, referring to the rigors of Earhart's long-distance flights.
Prasad set aside a few minutes each day for the express purpose of writing, all the while bearing in mind that same wellspring of inspiration.
The upcoming release of "Amelia," starring Hillary Swank and Richard Gere, coincides with that of "Breathe the Sky," the timing of which Prasad hopes will give flight to renewed curiosity about Earhart and her abbreviated life and career.
Although there may never be a definitive account as to what happened to Earhart 70 years ago, Prasad said she has a theory as to Earhart's fate, a concept she lays out in the conclusion of "Breathe the Sky." Her advice to anyone interested in Prasad's interpretation of the facts? Read the book.

NEW HAVEN — Author Chandra Prasad looks around the windswept tarmac at Robinson Aviation on a chilly day, the clouds swirling ominously, two private planes sitting at the ready.

“You know, it really does make you want to fly,” she says.

It was the wonder of that feeling, the freedom, the romance, the mystery of the most famous female flyer of all time, Amelia Earhart, that inspired Prasad’s latest book, “Breathe the Sky - A Novel Inspired by the Life of Amelia Earhart” (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, $14.99).

Just what did happen to Amelia Earhart? “Breathe the Sky” is an intriguing “what-if” that takes literary license to fill in the gaps missing from the biographies, the headlines and the speculation surrounding the life and disappearance of the aviatrix on July 2, 1937.

Prasad, a 1997 Yale grad who lives in Hamden with her husband, Basil, and toddler son, Nikhil, will be signing copies of the book, which was just published in October, at two area stores: Friday at 7 p.m. at R.J. Julia Booksellers, 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, and on Nov. 10 at 6 p.m. at Yale Barnes & Noble Bookstore, 77 Broadway, New Haven.

“When I was working on ‘On Borrowed Wings,’ I got to research Amelia Earhart for a bit, because she really did come to New Haven in the early 1930s and read at Yale ... From that, I wanted to know more about her and write about her in a larger format,” Prasad says about the subject.

The novel started as a book with three different story lines, with Earhart as one, “but as I was writing the other two story lines, they paled in comparison to her story.”

In her research, Prasad estimates she read 30 to 40 books on the aviator, who counted first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and countless celebrities and world dignitaries among her wide circle of admirers. Her challenge was how to make her book different.

“A lot of the book focuses on the last flight,” she says. “I picked things that were of interest to me, the highlights of her life, the things that weren’t documented ... ”

The author says that 95 percent of the book, “the novel,” she emphasizes, is factual, that she didn’t change facts of Earhart’s life, but she took literary license with filling in those gray areas, answering those questions whose answers were swallowed in the sea.

That’s part of the fun in reading it. One wonders, did this or that really happen?

“I wanted it to be new and fresh, to talk about the darker sides of what it was like in the cockpit, what it felt like in the air, what was she thinking, what were her fears,” she says.

The book is out at the same time as the movie, “Amelia,” starring Hilary Swank, which was somewhat coincidental, says Prasad. Though she was well on her way writing it, several years ago, Prasad’s publishers did plan the release date to coincide.

Prasad knew that tackling an icon like Earhart and coming up with that fresh material she wanted would be no easy task, especially since she was also trying to humanize a woman who had arguably a Teflon image.

Though she undoubtedly contributed to the breakup of her husband George Putnam’s previous marriage, Earhart was never salaciously dragged through the press as “the other woman” like some might be.

Prasad thinks it might have been because “she came at the right time in history. America was going through hard times, you wanted someone to look up to, someone that is a distance above everyone else.”

Literally, a distance.

“I didn’t want to take away from her accomplishments, because she’s amazing and I do idolize her in a way, but it’s clear she was flawed. Probably her worst flaw was she was stubborn and maybe bit off more than she could chew,” says Prasad.

The best part of Prasad’s book is that she never loses sight of the fame and accomplishments of the aviatrix, while revealing those flaws — a selfish side, a side probably necessary for the focus she needed for her goal of solo circumnavigating the globe, but which might also have strained relationships with some people.

What many forget is that she had a navigator in her plane — Fred Noonan — whose life she jeopardized in her stubborn decision to continue on the last leg of the journey, despite his warnings about fuel and the course she was flying.

At least that’s how Prasad portrays it. The final leg of the journey is one of the best parts of the book — chilling, poignant, graphic and full of imagery that makes one feel as if in the cockpit struggling to avoid the inevitable.

Describing Earhart as “smart, modelesque, photogenic,” Prasad says, “and she used all that.”

“But she campaigned for the Democratic Party, women’s rights, taught at Purdue University, was part owner of a commuter airline company. She was attaching her name to a lot of products,” says Prasad.

But did she want to do all those things or was she pushed into them by her publisher husband, who was a savvy, though sometimes aggressive businessman? What did she really feel about her marriage? What really happened in that cockpit over the Pacific? Was Noonan, a known drinker, in good health on that last leg?

“There were a lot of mechanical difficulties with the two ships (she was supposed to be in radio contact with). That’s a fact. She jettisoned the wire that was supposed to help communications. That’s a fact.

“So many things could have gone wrong. Did she listen to Noonan? The plane had already flown all over the world. She had one more leg. Any number of things could have gone wrong.”

Prasad says she has written “what I think is the most likely conclusion to this final flight.”

The fact that Earhart just totally diasppeared has only added to the mystique. “By now, her body and clothing are probably not going to ever be recovered, but you’d think some parts of the plane would have been found,” says Prasad.

Prasad relied on the technical know-how of Air Force veteran Quentin “Dale” Plumleigh,” whom she credits in the book for technical accuracy. She was referred to him when she sought an older aviator who would have knowledge of the navigational principles and kinds of crafts Earhart was flying.

Prasad, whose previous books, “On Borrowed Wings,” and “Death of a Circus,” were also set in the 1920s and 1930s, says she’s ready for modern times, and is currently working on a contemporary book for young adults.

Where are you, Amelia Earhart, America's most famous missing person?

Everywhere, as it turns out. And, starting Friday, she's on thousands of movie screens in the biopic Amelia, starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank.

More than seven decades after she flew off into the wild blue yonder, Earhart is fixed in the American consciousness more firmly than ever — maybe as much as she was in the 1930s, when she was a world-famous aviator, hero-worshiped by millions. She was one of the first mega-celebrities, who did things few people had ever done, let alone women. In 1937, she tried to circumnavigate the globe in a Lockheed Electra — and was never heard from again.

"There wasn't another woman like her in the world," says Sally Putnam Chapman, 71, granddaughter by an earlier marriage of George Putnam, Earhart's husband. "Women looked up to her; she opened the door for so many women at the time."

But all these years later, people are still talking, writing, even looking for her. Why the enduring fascination?

DISAPPEARANCE: Reporter's diary adds clue
PHOTOS: Earhart mystery

One reason is that Earhart, just shy of her 40th birthday when she disappeared, was enormously likable — charming and charismatic, intelligent, determined and brave.

"She was a class act," says Susan Larson, president of the Ninety-Nines International Organization of Women Pilots (Earhart was the first president), founded in 1929 when there were 117 licensed female pilots. (By 2002 there were an estimated 40,000, Larson says.)

At a time when women had only recently acquired the right to vote, when people (well, men) actually believed women couldn't fly because their periods would make them go berserk in the cockpit, and when flying was a truly dangerous occupation, Earhart cheerily defied conventions and got away with it. She lectured, wrote a magazine column, designed clothes and luggage, endorsed products, promoted aviation.

And she set records: In 1928 she was the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane, as a passenger. In 1932 she was the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone.

"She was like a grown-up Nancy Drew — a risk-taker, an adventurer in the age of adventure. She created a wonderful life for herself — she had it all and looked like she was having a great time," says Susan Butler, author of East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart (1997), one of the books the new movie is based on.

"She is so entrenched in the American experience — she's there like Ben Franklin and George Washington," says Ric Gillespie, author of Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance (2006). One of the Amelia hunters who is still looking for her, Gillespie will lead a 10th expedition next year to Nikumaroro Island, an uninhabited speck in the Pacific where he believes she crash-landed and died (the latest theory that few other Amelia experts believe).

"Any time a celebrity dies at the height of their career — whether it's Elvis or Marilyn or Michael Jackson— the public feels they've been taken too early and they're unwilling to accept the simple explanation," Gillespie says. Thus, he says, the proliferation of kooky Earhart theories over the years — that she was a spy, that she was captured by the Japanese, that she survived and returned to live her life in obscurity as a New Jersey housewife — all since discounted.

"The tragic mystery that surrounds her made the press pay special attention, and that wouldn't have happened if she had just died of old age," says aviator Elgen Long, 82, co-author with his late wife, Marie, of Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved. He's a leading proponent of the theory that Earhart got lost, ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.

Haunted by her

Earhart endures because the mystery of her fate endures, says another biographer, Mary Lovell, whose The Sound of Wings (1989) also served as a basis for the new movie. Lovell, author of an acclaimed biography of another woman flier of the period, Beryl Markham (Straight on Till Morning, 1987), says Earhart's widower, publisher Putnam, was a master promoter who marketed Earhart to a fare-thee-well before her last flight and then helped launch the headline-making search after she vanished.

"She was only a few days from home, and suddenly she disappears and this massive air search is hitting headlines day after day," says Lovell. "It's a mixture of the tragedy and George's superb PR."

Or, as The New Yorker poetically suggested last month, Earhart became an icon because "the unburied come back to haunt us."

Indeed, Earhart is all around us. Amelia will be the fourth movie about her, but it's the first big-budget action-adventure; earlier films were mostly forgettable made-for-TV movies. Shelf-loads of non-fiction books and at least two novels have been written about her, and more are on the way; older books, like Lovell's and Butler's, are being reissued to coincide with the movie.

"There's a cyclicality to the popularity of American legends; people who died in their prime are rediscovered every 10 years or so by a new generation," says writer Chandra Prasad, author of Breathe the Sky: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Amelia Earhart, released last week. "All signs point toward a huge surge in (Earhart) popularity this fall."

Regard and respect

Earhart's image — tall, bobbed hair, attractively androgynous, casually elegant in leather bomber jacket, jodhpurs and a man's tie — is so familiar to contemporary eyes it's hard to believe her photos were taken nearly a century ago. Advertisers, who have used Earhart's image to sell Gap khakis and Apple computers, don't even have to caption her pictures. When AT&T put up ads with Bill "I found the Internet" Kurtis on a desert island, a crashed airplane in the background with "Amelia" painted on its nose, few viewers could have missed the allusion.

And is there any other woman in American history with more places and things named for her? There are Earhart schools and scholarships, airports and parks, roads and bridges, statues and plaques. There's an Amelia Earhart Peak (11,982 feet) in Yosemite. There's an Amelia Earhart Earthwork, a 1-acre living portrait visible from the air near her birthplace of Atchison, Kan. There's a corona on Venus named Earhart. The U.S. Navy has named only a few ships after women, but there have been two christened for Earhart, including the supply ship USNS Amelia Earhart, commissioned in 2008.

There's the Earhart Light, a navigational day beacon on Howland Island, the tiny amoeba-shaped atoll of coral and guano in the Pacific Ocean that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were aiming for, but never found, in their attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The Earhart Light is crumbling — but it's still standing.

The civil-service crew of the USNS Amelia Earhart saw it this summer when the supply ship passed by Howland on its maiden mission and decided to pay respects. On June 23, with Howland in sight and the ship's bell tolling, they held a simple wreath-laying ceremony of remembrance near where Earhart and Noonan's Electra is believed to have gone into the wine-dark sea, about 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii. They had flown about 22,000 miles at that point.

"All hands on board felt a most pronounced feeling of regard and absolute respect for our namesake and the life she led," says Chief Mate Mike Price, e-mailing from somewhere in the Pacific.

Lost, but definitely not forgotten.

An eternal story

And now comes Amelia, which is sure to ramp up Earhart interest. It was directed by Indian-born Mira Nair (Vanity Fair, Salaam Bombay!) and produced by Ted Waitt, billionaire founder of Gateway Computers who has funded deep-water searches for Earhart's plane near Howland.

The movie focuses on Earhart's love life, asserting a love triangle among Amelia, Putnam (Richard Gere) and Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), the dashing head of the Bureau of Air Commerce and writer Gore Vidal's father. The filmmakers base this notion on Butler's book; she says she has no doubt that Earhart and Vidal were lovers, and she cites Gore Vidal (then about 10) as one of her sources.

Other Amelia experts scoff. "Spurious," Lovell says. "Unfortunate and unnecessary," Putnam Chapman says. "They're making stuff up," Larson says.

Nair says she sought to make a movie about "a thoroughly modern woman," a woman who, on the day they married, handed Putnam an extraordinary letter in which she repeated her reluctance to marry for fear that it would constrain her flying career, "which means so much to me. In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly," she wrote.

"I was dazzled by the bravery, the grace of her words," Nair says. "I saw in her story the eternal story, which is how to balance your passion with your responsibility. I hope that you'll know (from the movie) the human being behind the icon, the woman behind the symbol."