The Girl Who Flew Away Review

There was something of a theme in movies from the late 1960s up through the mid-1970s in which the audience would follow a relatively normal person around in their day-to-day challenges and struggles, and the movie would end with something of a question mark. The protagonist would have their primary conflicts of the movie resolved, but the larger question of what would happen next was left open, with the character realizing that their previous actions led to where there are, and they have nowhere to go, no plan to speak, and they face a completely uncertain future. Do things turn out okay for them? Did they learn from their mistakes or will they ignore them and keep doing what they've been doing, ending up right back where they are again?

Think Midnight Cowboy. The Graduate. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver.

The Girl Who Flew Away starts with Greer Johnson being hurridedly shoved on to a plane headed for Key West. We soon glean that she was impregnated by her boss, Dick Watrous, and he's gotten some of his friends to look after her. It's 1976, after all, and Dick is married to someone else so having Greer around would be problematic for him. Dick's friends Kate and Donald do take her in, but Kate almost immediately tries controlling Greer's life in the most passive-aggressive manner possible, claiming that they know best.

The story continues for the next several months as Greer wrestles with her emotions and tries to get a better bearing on her life. She had difficulties growing up, in part being from a mixed race couple in the 1960s, and in part because her father left when she was maybe six or seven, leading her mother into a depression. Her adult relationships, as highlighted by her affair with Dick, were always problematic as well, so she spends her time examining her life choices. However, we mostly only see that indirectly through a child character she first dreams about and then begins drawing a comic about.

She eventually gets fed up with Kate and Donald's perpetually condescending attitudes, as well as the unrequited love she expresses towards her friend Christopher back home, and gets on a bus to Atlanta with Kate's gardener, with whom she'd become friends. She falls asleep on the bus dreaming about the little girl character she had created.

Obviously, the ending of the two of them riding away on a bus with a big question mark in front of them immediately brought to mind The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy references I noted earlier. I didn't really clock the comparisons before those last couple pages, since the characters all come from radically different backgrounds and go through wildly different story arcs. But the basic premise of trying to make a big life change that doesn't necessarily address the underlying issues and problems you have is similar. And like those movies, the ending is presented in a fairly open-ended fashion allowing the reader to intrepret it however they like. You want a happily ever after? Sure, that fits. You'd rather they face a lifetime of consequences that make things tragically worse for them? Knock yourself out. Something in between? Why not?

Lee Dean does an excellent job with his storytelling here. There are several complex characters, and we learn about them just through their everyday actions. There's no real exposition dump anywhere for anyone. There's an occasional line of dialogue here and there that is expositional in nature, but they all feel very organic to whatever conversation is happening. And since the characters are all complex and fleshed out (at least for Dean, even if the reader isn't privvy to their full backstories) their recipocral dialogue tracks very well too.

One potential concern with the story here is that it focuses on the life of a mixed-race, single, pregnant woman. And the author is very much none of those things. They acknowledge this in the Afterword and point to several other books that discuss some of these ideas with more first-hand perspective, but while I think some of the social aspects of this didn't quite 100% hit the mark for 1976, Dean clearly did their homework and made a good effort. And besides, I was never a mixed-race, pregnant woman in the 1970s, so it's not like I have first-hand experience either.

I suspect this story will be remembered in much the same way as The Graduate or Midnight Cowboy are. People look at those now and say how it's easy to see how Dustin Hoffman launched such an impressive career from those. A decade or two from now, we'll be saying the same about Lee Dean. The story was originally serialized online beginning in 2013, although I gather only about three-quarters of it and that all seems to have been removed anyway, likely because of its print publication via Iron Circus Comics. The book came out recently after a bit of a delay, but should be available now through all major book sellers. It retails for $28.00 US.

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