Under a Wing: A Memoir

Reeve Lindbergh's memoir offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her family led by her intensely private father, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and mother, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Under a Wing captures both her parents' complex personalities with immediacy and intimacy. Reeve explores the contrast between a loving father who "would parade imaginary animals across our backs" and the exacting patriarch who, upon return from his frequent absences, called each of his five children into his office to peruse a handwritten list of their achievements and failures. She seems anguished in her response to one of Charles's notorious, bigoted speeches: "How could someone who spoke the words my father did in 1941," she asks, "how did such a person then raise children who by his instruction and his example, day after day and year after year, had learned from him ... that such words were repellent and unspeakable?" She offers too a blunt but tender portrait of Anne in old age--she has been physically and mentally impaired by a series of stroke--that proves she has a mature understanding of a deeply loving woman who nonetheless always held some part of herself in reserve for her writing. This impressive memoir brings readers close to the private people within two legendary public figures.