2021
First Published
3.63
Average Rating
17
Number of Pages
As we struggle with new anxieties, the New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book tackles an old fear in this insightful and hypnotizingly funny essay about taking off and letting go. Susan Orlean has a full-on phobia of flying—an epic inconvenience for an author on a national book tour. With her trademark curiosity, she decides to rewire her thinking through hypnosis. Along the way, Susan discovers a lot about the unconscious mind, suggestibility, Mesmer, Freud, today’s cutting-edge treatments, and the dulling power of a sonorous voice. Most of all, she learns what it takes to close her eyes, open them again at thirty thousand feet, and finally be able to exhale. And you can too.
Avg Rating
3.63
Number of Ratings
522
5 STARS
23%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
37%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
Susan Orlean
Author · 17 books
I'm the product of a happy and uneventful childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland, followed by a happy and pretty eventful four years as a student at University of Michigan. From there, I wandered to the West Coast, landing in Portland, Oregon, where I managed (somehow) to get a job as a writer. This had been my dream, of course, but I had no experience and no credentials. What I did have, in spades, was an abiding passion for storytelling and sentence-making. I fell in love with the experience of writing, and I've never stopped. From Portland, I moved to Boston, where I wrote for the Phoenix and the Globe, and then to New York, where I began writing for magazines, and, in 1987, published my first piece in The New Yorker. I've been a staff writer there since 1992.
