Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947–1986

These previously unpublished diaries and letters are by (1906–2001) the wife of Charles Lindbergh, herself an aviator and bestselling author of Gift from the Sea, which rehabilitated an image tarnished by her and her husband Charles’s support of fascism.) Written between Lindbergh’s 40s and her 80th birthdays, the book begins with her anguish contemplating an abortion when pregnant for a seventh time and ends with a letter to Reeve, her youngest daughter, a year after the death of Reeve’s infant son. In between, Lindbergh frets over German suffering in the wake of WWII; discusses her working life as a writer and her psychoanalysis for her depression; and reels with the shock of JFK’s assassination. There is much about her ambivalence toward her husband: she doesn’t expect marriage to fill her essential loneliness or that she will be Charles’s only nourishment. (In fact, after Anne’s death, Charles’s extramarital liaisons and illegitimate children became public.) She feels abandoned by his frequent absences while she also sees how the artist in her benefits from solitude; she’s ashamed of her jealousy and bitter over his success as a writer; but after Charles’s death in 1974 she expresses acute grief, numbness and disorientation, and how she hates time rushing him away. A perceptive, intimate, and spirited journey of a woman as artist, wife, and mother. Agent: Jennie Dunham, Dunham Literary Agency. (Apr.)