Interview with Julia Cooke

Julia Cooke is the author of two books: Come Fly the World: The Jet Age Story of the Women of Pan Am (2021), and The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba (2014). Her essays have been published in Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House, A Public Space, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor, and her journalism has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy, The Village Voice, The Atavist, Saveur, and more. She recently visited the University of New Hampshire as part of the English Department’s long-standing Writer’s Series.

Nonfiction editor, Claire Sasko interviewed Julia Cooke. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Claire Sasko: Your latest book, Come Fly the World, is about the stewardess of Pan Am. You’re the daughter of a Pan Am executive. Can you talk about how this played a role in your upbringing and decision to become a writer?

Julia Cooke: My dad worked for Pan Am until I was nine. In my early life, I was carted along on lots of different, spontaneous trips. Because we were flying for free, we didn’t always know where we would be going. My mom and dad would take me and my sister to the airport, packed for either hot or cold weather, and then we would just get on whatever airplane was going somewhere interesting. I don't think the spontaneity and excitement of that hit me until I was much older, but what did shape me was being in adult spaces and being around people who were different from me, speaking different languages. It made me curious and also made me a reader.

It was much later, in my intellectual life, that I realized all these different stories about these places I had visited were not being told in the way I was observing them. When I studied abroad as a college student in Cuba, I walked away feeling a gulf in the reported narrative of the place. I felt like the Cuba I had participated in as a 20-year-old was not the Cuba that was being reported in the Times or by whoever else. You've got really beautiful films and gorgeous novels that are coming out of Cuba in that same era, but the media wasn't really catching on to those. 

“Come Fly the World” focuses on five women in particular. I'm wondering why you chose to highlight their stories. I know you’ve addressed logistical reasons in previous interviews; can you also speak to the emotional side of this decision?

Absolutely. So on a really practical level, I spend a lot of time with my subjects. I did so with my book on Cuba, and I did with this book. I need a lot of time with people to really feel like I know something about them, and I don't like to be around people I don't like. So I really just wanted to like my interview subjects, and I admired these women. Each of them represented a part of the story that I thought was important on a logistical level, and then on a more emotional or sentimental level, I enjoyed their company.

You interviewed many, many subjects for both of your books, then conducted research to fill in the holes of their stories. Can you kind of take me through your interview process in three steps—meaning, first, how you prepare for an interview; second, how you conduct an interview; and third, what you do immediately after an interview? 

So preparing for the interview is pretty slapdash. I know I should be more organized and systematic about my research, but I really just look at what interests me. Then I'll come up with a bunch of questions, usually a combination of very specific and very, very open-ended questions. People are very different in responding to interviews, so I think staying flexible and curious is really important. Afterwards, the most important thing—the best advice I ever got as far as interviewing—is to transcribe everything as soon as it's humanly possible. Because there are things I forget, observations that I have, that I don't remember even hours later. 

People have said this book reads like a novel—perhaps because your scene writing is so vivid. Can you talk about how you’re able to recreate these scenes in such detail?

You know, I had to adapt a basically journalistic background to writing about history, which is very different, because there's no “there” [physical place] to report from. So I'm going to explain to you, as an example, how I composed the chapter in which Tori observes a diplomatic kidnapping. I interviewed Tori, and she mentioned that this group of diplomats had been kidnapped off of her plane, and my mind was blown. I walked away from the interview thinking, ‘This cannot possibly have happened the way she described it.’ So I went to secondary sources, like The New York Times, or like the Encyclopedia of World Events, to look it up. And in fact, it turned out that the events were exactly the same as what she had described. I then read secondary sources and went back to Tori, and said, ‘Okay, here's what you described, and here's what I read. How does this jog your memory?’ The next step was actually looking for primary sources from government files. So I did a FOIA request, I looked in some declassified National Archives files, and I found a couple of memos that referred to the event itself. Then I went back to Tori a third time and interviewed her again. 

There’s a question we’ve been considering in our program, which I’m very curious to hear your opinion on: What does it mean, to you, when people say a piece of nonfiction “reads like a novel” or “reads like fiction?”

Real life is desultory. It doesn't always follow a narrative arc. We want climaxes and punch lines, scenes and characters, rather than information coming at us. So I think what people are getting at with that kind of a comment is that something reads really immersively.

I want to focus on two aspects of your work that struck me in how they relate to motivation to write. The first is something you said before—you said you questioned these stewardesses, like Tori, claiming to have so much access to important geopolitical events at the time, then felt shame and anger around this reaction, which propelled the book forward. The second incident that I want to talk about is a quote from your essay on birth, “Intimate Odyssey," published by Virginia Quarterly Review:

“To give birth and to want to talk about it, or to approach birth and to try to learn about it, is to find oneself at the center of a fraught negotiation of power and powerlessness over a woman’s role and place, the inequities she faces or does not face in the United States today. A single story, a moment of violence and vulnerability amid a Western medical culture that aspires to dominion over the body, grows and grows until it becomes a shimmering wall encompassing identity, politics, values, medicine, culture, and more. And beneath it all, no one seems able to agree: What does childbirth mean, and what does it do to the person who gives birth?”

Do you often set out to write something based on a question like this, or based on that feeling of anger that you kind of felt with Pan Am? 

I've been trying to figure that out myself. I don't know what motivates me to write specific things. But all of my books are motivated by the sense that history has not recorded something correctly, and that a group of people whose voices are really essential are not being given their due.

So much of your writing has focused on women and your own experiences as a woman—your essay “A Girl Like You” (published by Virginia Quarterly Review) as well as “Intimate Odyssey.” In the latter, you write:

“And what if I don't feel that my son's birth transformed me? Motherhood may be transformational, but birth need not be. For some, birth is a means to an end, a trial in the way that any extreme physical feat is realized, but no more. And so birth stories wind down, in so many cases, to the same thing that consumes how we often talk about women: the need to provide a reason for her story to be important."

This line also really struck me. Because as writers, we constantly feel a need to show why stories are important—and to show the larger societal effects of stories that are going untold. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, as well as expand on what, in your opinion, do these stories—the ones that we feel like we need to find a reason for them to be considered important—all have in common? 

Yeah. Such a good question. And I don't know that I even know a real answer. You know, I have this art hung up on my wall. And it says, ‘To read is to empower, to empower is to write, to write is to influence, to influence is to change, to change is to live.’ And it's pretty simplistic on some level—and yet there is a real generative link between stories and living.

This next book that I'm working on is not about me, and yet it is intimately about me, because it's about how a group of women in a different era worked really hard to make stories that were authentic for them. And that's what I want to do. So I think this metric of trying to make stories that are deemed by other people to be important, is, on the one hand, a really stupid one, and on the other hand, a really important one. Because, you know, if just a couple people find my writing important, and it helps them to live their lives, then I'm pretty satisfied. But I also think, to have to subject your stories to the question of, ‘Why does this matter in a patriarchal world that hasn't tended to value the stories of people who don't fit that largely male, largely white storyline?’—that's also bullshit. I think there's a fine line between acknowledging that asking anyone to read something I’ve written is asking them to invest an important resource—time—in whatever story it is I am telling, and being cowed by these systems that have historically prized one kind of voice, one sort of story over others. 

Thanks so much for speaking with me, Julia.