But it was her self-doubt that had kept her from doing, she stated in Starting in the Middle, “what I most feared, desperately wanted, and never had the nerve to try.” It had been only five years since she’d taken the leap: At age 42, when her son joined the Hare Krishna movement and her daughter went to college, Judy “went to the typewriter,” as she put it. Being a “hearthkeeper” (Judy’s word) and raising her two children, Claudia and Paul, had consumed much of her time. For the better part of two decades, she had longed to be a writer. Judy would go, despite feeling sick and despite suffering from a fear of flying so bad that her “head trembled,” as she described it, from takeoff to landing.
#Air crash investigation radio silence registration#
to beat the long registration lines and get the lay of the land before the conference started in the afternoon. A fact-checker at Playboy who would later work as a literary editor at Chicago magazine, Newman had booked a morning flight from Chicago to L.A. Thus, the gentle encouragement of her friend Christine Newman over the phone that Thursday night: “You should go.” Newman would be there. Having ascended the local bestsellers list, it was beginning to attract national attention. Her first book, the memoir Starting in the Middle (a rumination on middle age that “polishes the pearls of anxiety,” as Kirkus Reviews described it), had been published just a few weeks earlier and had already earned a measure of commercial and critical success. At 47, she was going as a bona fide author with a bona fide hit of her own. More important to her, she was not going as a plus-one of her beloved Shel, who, as managing editor of Playboy magazine, made the trip each year.
Along with her husband, Sheldon, she was taking a trip to Los Angeles for the American Booksellers Association convention, one of the biggest publishing events of the year. It was an unfortunate bit of timing, given her plans for the following afternoon, Friday, May 25, 1979.
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