Margaret's Reviews > Life Takes Wings: Becoming the World's First Female 747 Pilot

I managed to have a forty-year career as a reference librarian at a county public library branch without ever understanding the difference between a memoir and a biography.

I knew that memoirs were personal stories, as were autobiographies. But I had never read one and so never "got it". Meaning I never understood the difference between the two genres.

Memoirs, it turns out, have more in common with historical fiction and with the movies that proclaim to be "based on a true story".

Memoirs describe what the story FELT LIKE to the person living through this experience. Like historical fiction and the movies "based on a true story", supporting characters in a memoir can be an amalgam of several different people meshed into one character for clarity and story purposes.

I wanted to read Life Takes Wings by Lynn Rippelmeyer because we came from the same generation. She was only a year or so older than me.

I, too, grew up in the 1950's and had the conversation with my mother that, if I didn't get married and needed to be able to support myself, the careers open to women were nursing and teaching. (Librarians were not mentioned during that conversation but could be seen as lumped together with teachers.)

I became a librarian. My sister became a teacher.

I was in a career where most of my fellow librarians were women. But I was very aware that in the 1970's women were entering what had earlier been considered male-only careers.

Ms. Rippelmeyer had to thread the needle to get the flying hours/experience she needed to become an airline pilot before the age of thirty without the path her male counterparts took because the men could join the military and become military pilots. They didn’t need college either to earn their wings.

By the time Ms. Rippelmeyer thought of joining the military (which had produced the pilots being hired by the airlines in the 1960's & 1970's), she was 24 and could not devote seven years to the military and still be under 30 when she applied to be an airline pilot. (Age 30 was literally the cutoff age. Over thirty and the airlines would not hire you whether you were a man or a woman.)

Ms. Rippelmeyer is also the ONLY person who was a flight attendant first and literally transferred from the cabin to the cockpit.

It is also true that Ms. Rippelmeyer was a beneficiary of many lucky breaks.

Opportunities became available to her at crucial times. She was able to cobble together both the flying hours and the book learning needed to pass the stringent written FAA exams as a civilian whereas her fellow (male) pilots had all learned to fly as military pilots.

Her career started when she put herself through college. TWA required a four-year college degree to apply to become an airline pilot (which was not necessarily on Ms. Rippelmeyer's radar when she got her degree in English literature and Educational Psychology).

This is the FIRST print book I have read since my disastrous fall in 2018, when I destroyed my right shoulder. I was able to read this book because it was a 245-page trade paperback which was both very engagingly written AND vivid. This book had short chapters with punchy anecdotes that spiced up each chapter and made her book a real page turner!

I had also earlier seen a presentation by Ms. Rippelmeyer about her career as the first woman to fly a Boeing 747 so I knew that she could tell a good story and I really liked the feminist aspect of breaking down gender barriers.

During her recent author reading/book signing, Ms. Rippelmeyer said that her writing teacher had explained that a memoir is about how her experience had FELT as she was living it, not just about the facts.

An autobiography presents an author's life from soup to nuts. That is, from the time the person had been born, that person's childhood and early career, and then whatever events had made that person notable or famous, etc. Like the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

When you write a memoir, you do do research to try to get the facts covered as correct as possible but you may well have to reconstruct conversations which had not been written down at the time, the same as the author writing a historical fiction book has to do.

A memoir covers a particular period in an author's life, particular experiences, and may in fact jump around rather than just present the tale in strict chronological order.

Ms. Rippelmeyer's book was not published by the usual suspects (traditional publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Harper, etc.). Nor is the book simply self-published. Instead, Ms. Rippelmeyer went with Morgan James, a hybrid between the two extremes of traditional publishing & outright self-publishing.

In fact, she was advised that she was really writing TWO books. The first goes through her time as a flight attendant and when she first became an airline pilot. The second explores her airline pilot career and what her life was like as she realized her longtime dream of flying commercial jets for a living!

Highly recommended for women who lived through the beginning of women being able to take their places in male-dominated careers and for those 21st Century women who wanted to know how it all started for women who wanted to break out of the nurses-or-teachers-only career paths for women!

And highly recommended for open-minded men who believe that girls should grow up to be anything that they wanted to be, just like their brothers do.