Guests:
* Rossana D’Antonio – Author of 26 Seconds: Grief and Blame in the Aftermath of Losing My Brother in a Plane Crash
* Marty Ross-Dolen – Author of Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter’s Search for Truth
Two authors, Rossana D’Antonio and Marty Ross-Dolen, each faced the unimaginable loss of loved ones in separate plane crashes decades apart. Their grief led them to write powerful memoirs—Rossana’s 26 Seconds and Marty’s Always There, Always Gone—that explore truth, healing, and the lasting impact of tragedy. In an extraordinary coincidence, both books were released in the same week, a situation that could easily spark feelings of rivalry or jealousy between writers. Instead, their shared experience created a bond as they connected over loss, resilience, and the courage it takes to turn pain into story. This episode dives into that connection, exploring not only grief but also the unexpected solidarity found in telling similar stories side by side.
Hey everyone, it's Jenny Nash. This episode happens to feature an Author Accelerator book coach. Author Accelerator is the company I founded more than 10 years ago to lead the emerging book coaching industry. If you've been curious about what it takes to become a successful book coach, which is to say, someone who makes money, meaning, and joy out of serving writers, I've just created a bunch of great content to help you learn more. You can access it all by going to bookcoaches.com/waitlist. We'll be enrolling a new cohort of students in our certification program in October, so now's a perfect time to learn more and start making plans for a whole new career.
Transcript below!
EPISODE 464 - TRANSCRIPT
Jennie Nash
Hey everyone. It's Jennie Nash. This episode happens to feature an Author Accelerator book coach. Author Accelerator is the company I founded more than 10 years ago to lead the emerging book coaching industry. If you've been curious about what it takes to become a successful book coach, which is to say someone who makes money, meaning and joy out of serving writers. I've just created a bunch of great content to help you learn more. You can access it all by going to book bookcoaches.com/waitlist. That's bookcoaches.com/waitlist. We'll be enrolling a new cohort of students in our certification program in October, so now’s a perfect time to learn more and start making plans for a whole new career.
Multiple Speakers
Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay, now—one, two, three.
Jennie Nash
Hey everyone. I'm Jennie Nash, and this is the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast, the place where we talk about writing all the things, short things, long things, fiction, nonfiction, pitches and proposals. Today I'm here to talk with two writers who I brought together because of a very interesting coincidence; each of these writers recently published a memoir about a plane crash. They each lost somebody that they love in a plane crash, and they wrote a story about their search for understanding and their search for healing and what it all means to their lives. These two books are really different stories, which I think is so interesting and says so much about the creative process. And what's remarkable is that these two books were published just one week apart, and these two writers became aware of each other's books and became friends. I happened to have a connection to each of these writers. At several points throughout her writing process, I coached Rossana D’Antonio including the very first time she came into a classroom to write about this story. Her book is called 26 Seconds: Grief and Blame in the Aftermath of Losing My Brother in a Plane Crash. Marty Ross-Dolen is the other author. Her book is called Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter's Search for Truth. Marty is a writer who came into my Author Accelerator book coach certification program to study how to become a book coach, and that's when I became aware of her and her story. In this conversation, Marty and Rossana come together with me to talk about grief, writing, jealousy and so many of the things that make memoir such a difficult and challenging genre to write and also such a satisfying one. I can't wait for you to listen. So let's get started. Welcome Rossana and Marty. I'm so excited to have you both here today to talk about this incredible topic. And before we get going, we are talking just days after there was a terrible plane crash in India in which a lot of people died and one man walked away, and there's a plane crash at the center of both of your books. And I just wanted to start by asking, how do you feel when this happens as it happens so many times, you know, are you okay as we sit here today? Or does this weigh on you? What is it? What is it like to sit here today? So maybe we'll start Rossana with you.
Rossana D’Antonio
Okay, well, thanks, Jennie, for inviting me on your podcast. It's really exciting to be here and to share, you know, this podcast with Marty. And, yeah, I mean, I, I agree with you. It's really, I mean, I think our memoirs—it's just so timely that they're out during this time because it's, you know, it's not just Air India. We've had several incidents within the last several years, actually, that have brought to light the strain in the aviation industry. It's been, it's been really interesting because, as it seems like there's not a day that goes by that there isn't something in the news with regards to plane crashes or plane incidents, near misses, whatever it may be. But as we experience each incident, and it becomes breaking news, and you know, we're witnessing it on live TV, it is, it is hard not to relive the experience. And I'm—I'll speak for myself—it is hard for me not to relive the experience. And in the book, I kind of talk about it because I say that it's kind of like we belong to this group that we never asked to be part of and this group is made of families of the victims of plane crashes. And, you know, the very first images that you see are of the grieving families and the pain and the grief that is stamped on their faces, the shock of it all. Plane crashes are so dramatic and so violent that it's hard not to get caught up in the whole story, and it's hard not to think of the families and want to comfort them, knowing that their hell is just starting, and all the things that they're going to have to go through, you know, with regards to the aftermath, the investigation, recovering their loved ones and their loved ones' belongings. So it is hard, but I try to, I try to focus on hoping that their recovery or their healing—the sooner they face the disaster, the tragedy—their healing can actually start.
Jennie Nash
It's got to be so hard. We'll, we'll return to all of these topics again. But Marty, you’re... what are your thoughts?
Marty Ross-Dolen
I echo what Rossana says about how—first, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I echo, and I love being here with Rossana, and I echo what she says as well. When I see some sort of headline or announcement that an airplane accident has taken place, my heart sinks. My stomach sinks. I know that I'm going to be in it for a couple of days, if not longer, and nowadays, with social media and the immediacy of information—and for the first time, with this devastating Air India crash, and part of it is because there was a survivor—we have information that we've never had before about the experience of it, and somehow, what came across my news feed on social media as well were videos of the inside of the cabin just before the crash. I don't even know how these were available. I don't even know if they're real because of AI—it's... but then I see that because I can't not see it, and I'm stuck with that in my brain until it goes into that little pocket that contains all those things that we see over our lifetimes that we try never to think about again. So it's hard, it's really hard, and it's really hard to get on an airplane. But that's true for everyone. That's true for everyone, but because, as Rossana describes, we're members of this group, this club that we didn't sign on for, it's probably extra hard.
Jennie Nash
Yeah, I want to come back to that "get on an airplane" thing, but just so our listeners can know about the stories that I'm referring to here, we know that you both wrote books, and they're both memoirs, and they're very, very different experiences for the reader—vibes, purposes, feelings, all of those things—and yet they share this plane crash at the center. So I wanted to ask if you would each just give a summary of what your book is about—the title, what it's about—so our readers can know, our listeners can know, what we're talking about. Your readers, our listeners. Rossana, we're kind of in a pattern here, so why don't you go first?
Rossana D’Antonio
Sure. Thanks, Jennie. So my story, my book, is 26 Seconds: Grief and Blame in the Aftermath of Losing My Brother in a Plane Crash. And it's the story of—well, the title says it all, right? So on May 30, 2008, TACA Flight 390 departed from El Salvador International Airport en route to Miami, Florida, with an interim stop in Honduras at one of the most notoriously dangerous airports in the world, Toncontín International Airport. The area was buffeted by Tropical Storm Alma at the time. So there was a lot of wind, a lot of rain, a lot of fog, and when TACA Flight 390 attempted to land on the airport's very short runway, it overshot the runway, crashed into an embankment, and killed five people—three in the plane, including my brother, the pilot, and two in a car that were crushed when the plane landed on them. The book is my search for the truth as to what truly happened on that day. I suspected my brother would be made a scapegoat. Seventy percent of airplane accidents are blamed on the pilot, and so I just suspected that that would be our reality. And so this book is the story about me finding answers to the questions as to what happened that day.
.Jennie Nash
And in terms of the timeline of this story, when I first met you, you had just begun to write about it. I think it was 10 years. Oh, no, I've got that wrong. How long after the event? You came into a class of mine at UCLA—it was really close to the event.
Rossana D’Antonio
Yeah. So it was February of 2009, so it was a little over six months. So it was still very, very raw.
Jennie Nash
I know the 10 years part is you came back to me 10 years later, having finally wrapped your hands around how you wanted to approach it. So the story as you write it is 10–15 years after the event, looking back on it and all the work that you did to understand this crash and you are uniquely positioned. And I remember thinking about this way back when I first met you. You have a very unique perspective on disaster, and you have a very unique positioning or perspective from which to look at that. Do you want to explain what that is?
Rossana D’Antonio
Sure. So I'm an engineer. I'm a civil engineer, and I worked for over three decades in the public sector at Los Angeles County Public Works. I was over—as I left county service, I was a deputy director over our emergency management business area, and so I was trained to respond to all sorts of different disasters. Our agency managed several pieces of infrastructure, including five different airports. So I was trained to not only plan, design, construct infrastructure, but also to respond to emergencies following not only natural disasters but, you know, human-made disasters. And following these disasters, I was the lead for preparing after-action reports, which essentially describe what happened, what went wrong, what went well, and what lessons learned can we actually take away from these disasters. So that was my background.
Jennie Nash
Yeah, it's an incredible connection to this tragic event. So we'll come back to that in a minute. So Marty, tell us about your book.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Sure. So my book is entitled Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter's Search for Truth. And in 1960, my grandparents were killed in an airplane accident that was a collision over New York Harbor. Their plane—they had left Columbus, Ohio. They were traveling to New York, and they were on a TWA Super Constellation, and then a United jet that had originated in Chicago was flying in. My grandparents’ plane was set for landing in LaGuardia. The United flight was set for landing in Idlewild, which is now JFK Airport. The United plane got off course and collided with my grandparents’ plane. My grandparents’ plane landed in Staten Island in an empty airfield, and the United flight actually continued for a few miles and landed in Park Slope, Brooklyn, killing people on the ground. So on the planes, there were 128 people who lost their lives, and then six people on the ground in Brooklyn. And because of that horrific situation in Brooklyn, that's where most of the sort of media was focused. There was one survivor who survived for about 24 hours—a boy—but he didn't live. My grandparents were on their way from Columbus to New York to meet for a meeting to talk about their family business, their iconic family magazine Highlights for Children, and they were looking to place the magazine on the newsstands. So they were executives with the company, and this accident was actually the largest commercial jet airplane disaster up until that time in 1960, so it was a pretty well-known, famous accident.
Jennie Nash
So you two have a very unique connection to that accident, and where you stood when you wrote about it is much further in the future from the crash itself, because your mother, if I remember correctly, was 14 years old at the time.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Right. So my mom was 14. It was six years before I was born, so obviously I didn't know my grandparents. My mom was the second oldest of five, and they moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Austin, Texas, to live with a paternal uncle and his family. And so my book is more about my experience of being raised by a mother who was in protracted mourning after having lost her parents and not had a way to process her grief as an adolescent, and as she got older. So my approach to my book is from that angle primarily, in addition to getting to know my grandmother through her letters, which was a significant goal through the writing process.
Jennie Nash
Right. So you have this reverberation through time of this accident and your connection to the work your grandparents did. You're a writer, you're an editor, you're a person who deals with story, and they were—I mean, I was such a reader of Highlights back in the day—and that, you know, you use the word iconic, you know, probably launched the careers of so many writers and thinkers, and you have a connection through time with that, which is a very unique perspective to have on your story. So you each bring these very different ways of looking at this event. So before we kind of dig into the decisions you each made around how to structure your book, and the tone and shape and all of that, part of the reason we're all talking here today is this, what I think of as a very delightful outcome of these books, which is that you know each other. You've met each other after the books were written. And oftentimes we think, when we're writing something, that well, we think several things: nobody's ever written anything like this, and everybody else has already written this story. What do I have to say? You know, those sort of back-and-forth thoughts that writers often have—Is this unique? Do I have something to add? Do I have something to say? How am I going to serve my readers, or what experience am I going to give to my readers? And then, you know just those pinging back-and-forth thoughts. And it's not very often that we get to actually meet a writer who, at the same time, in the same phase here of publishing, you know, just the same year even, has written something that is similar-ish, you know, about a plane crash, but totally different books. But I just want to ask you each about the meeting of each other and the thinking of that book, and what that's like, because it's so unusual to get to have this kind of conversation. So, you know, I imagine there are lots of things going through your head when you heard about this other book or, you know, I don't know if I have a connection to both of you. I don't know if it came from me or what, but why don't we start this time with you, Marty.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Yeah, one of the great joys of this last year has been publishing with the same publisher as Rossana, and for us to get to know each other, because we both published our books with She Writes Press, and we just happened to be in the same cohort of summer 2025. We published in the same month, one week apart. Yeah, yeah. And I remember when we first were introducing ourselves as a group, and Rossana mentioned what her story was about. And my reaction was, is it really true? Is there really another airplane accident story amongst us? Because it is—it's not common. I mean, you don't very often come across people who have lost loved ones this way, and what became clear to me over time was that our books were very, very different. And by the nature of the fact that Rossana lost her beloved brother, who she was very close to, and I lost grandparents I had never met, our stories were just—and there's decades that separate these events—so by those natures, it was clear to me that our books were going to be different. I was excited to read Rossana's book. I was also apprehensive because, for the same reason that I described about when I'm reading about it in the news, it's just hard. But I will say, in reading Rossana's beautiful book, I immediately noticed just kindred spirits with her as a writer. It happened early in the chapters that I was reading. I had used the word lullaby to describe the sound of the engines getting going when you're sitting on a plane and it's about to take off, and sort of the sound of almost a lullaby that will put you to sleep. The person who was working with me as I was writing kept crossing that word out: “That doesn't make sense. Why would you call that a lullaby?” And I wanted it in there. It felt so right. And Rossana described that exact time, those sounds, as a lullaby. It was like; this is something that's just unique about people who have experienced what we've experienced.
Jennie Nash
Oh, wow, that's so interesting. Rossana, what about you? Your coming upon Marty's book.
Rossana D’Antonio
I know. What are the odds, right? I mean, I had never met anyone who had ever experienced a plane crash in their family. As a matter of fact, I'm going to get geeky here, but the U.S. Department of Transportation statistics indicate that one in 2 billion people will die in a plane crash. So what are the odds that, you know, life would bring Marty and I together, that had this connection, not only with the plane crash but also with you, Jennie? I mean some that came out later on. And so I thought, wow, you know, talk about serendipity and, you know, the mysterious ways of life. And although, you know, these are very different stories, I mean, they're connected at their core by a common theme, right? Very similar tragedies. And when I read Marty's book, like she says, there was—I was taken aback because there were many similar passages, you know, how we describe things or how we perceive things. There were a lot of commonalities, even though we came from it from different perspectives, which again reinforces my belief that we're part of this group that we never want to be a part of, and we'll always be connected in one way or another. I think one of the things, though, that was obvious when I read her book was that I connected, I understood, I related to her mom, obviously, right? Her mom was one that had experienced this plane crash, so it was kind of obvious the way it had impacted her, the tragedy, the aftermath, the bottling up of her feelings, PTSD, whatever—all of that I, like, clicked. But I think the most fascinating part of Marty's book was how that grief could be transferred from generation to generation. And I thought that was the fascinating thing that I learned that I really didn't know, and how these tragedies can be prolonged for, you know, generations.
Jennie Nash
Yeah, it's—well, first of all, thanks for geeking out because that is a good description of what your book is. You have a lot in your book that is kind of geeky in a—you know, you really get into the aviation industry, into the nuts and bolts of, literally, planes and how they function to the way that governments and reports about accidents function. So when reading your book, people get that layer, which is, you know, you bring to that work. So, geek out all you want. It's great. And Marty's book, by contrast, is this exploration of, you know, you drop a pebble in a pond, and how does it hit the shores? And that very emotional—you know, she had a mother immersed in grief. And what does that do to the child? And then the child's impulse to—I think it's the word search in both of your subtitles, I think it might be, or certainly the concept of it—but that idea of a quest or a journey or, you know, a need to understand. And in Rossana's case, it's what happened on that day. In Marty's case, what happened to my mom? You know, like, what was this thing that happened to my mom? And you're both seeking—that core of both of them. So I want to ask about, because I'm fascinated by this—you know, there's a raw material of a story, and how you make your choices about what the tone of that story is going to be, or the shape and structure of that story, what you want the reader to feel or to experience. Can you both go back to when you knew you were going to write about it? I think that's the first thing, is how did you catch this idea as, "This is a thing I'm going to write about"? Marty, do you want to start with that one?
Marty Ross-Dolen
Sure. I started writing after I attended a 50th anniversary memorial event for the airplane accident. And there's a sort of story that leads up to that memorial event and my attending it. But prior to that—which was, so that was 2010—prior to that, I wasn't necessarily inclined to write about it. So after attending this memorial event in 2010, a few months later, I just started telling the story of the memorial and putting some backstory into it, and that ended up being an essay that was about... I don't know, it was a long essay, like, say, 40 pages, but I was told the story was done. Because for those of us that like to use writing and words and language to try to process those things that are sitting—that we're obsessing about or sitting in our minds—I wanted to have done that and be done, because this thing was deeper than anything else that I could excavate in terms of pain in my life. So after I submitted this essay to a class that I was taking at Ohio State—writing, creative writing workshop—and at the end of the semester, the professor said to me that he thought that really what I was doing was writing a book, because there was too much material here and I hadn't done what needed to be done. My stomach sank because I didn't want to write a book. It wasn't—I wanted to be done with this topic. So I took his feedback and all of my workshop peers' feedback, and I stuck it all, the pile of papers, into a cabinet, and it stayed there for 14—well, 10—years.
Jennie Nash
Wow!
Marty Ross-Dolen
Yeah. And then, during that time, my mother had become the archivist for Highlights, for the family business, and was going through all of the saved artifacts and materials and papers related to the company and the family. And I had always wanted to know my grandmother better. My grandmother is the person I'm named for. I had always known a lot of stories about her, but I asked my mom if she had access to any letters that she might come across in the attics and basements that she was excavating—could I have them? So she started sending them to me. So while I had an essay in the cabinet, I had bins of letters from my grandmother in the basement. And that whole time, anybody who would ask me what I was working on, writing-wise, I'd say, "Well, you know I've got these letters in the basement..." but I never did anything with it. I just couldn't—it was too—everything was too overwhelming. And then what happened for me is that COVID—when the pandemic, you know, 2020, started—became part of our lives. I realized that it was an opportunity for me to pursue an MFA that I had wanted to do for a long time because it was going to be remote. And then I realized I've got time, and I could pull all of this out and see if it was something worth tackling. So that's the story of the decision to write. It was a slow one.
Jennie Nash
Wow. Oh, so interesting. And Rossana, well, we heard that you, six months after your brother died, you were in this class trying to learn how to write about it, which, at the time, I didn't quite put together that had been so recent. So when did you decide you were going to write about it? How did you know?
Rossana D’Antonio
Yeah, so, I mean, I didn't set out to write a book. I just started to write. And as you know, as an engineer, I wasn't really trained to be like a memoir writer or writing essays of this type of nature. But I have to give you so much credit, because when I went to your class—and I went out of curiosity to see, well, is anything I'm scribbling down in these journals, is anything really good?—and so your class brought me together with all these other students, and, you know, reading some of the material out loud, all of a sudden, it was a four-day—I don't know if you remember—it was a four-day, one of these four-day intensive classes, and at the end, we're reading our material, and all these strangers are suddenly referring to my brother like they know him, and I recognize that it was because I was somehow relaying his story to them, and I was somehow, maybe through my work or my words, keeping him alive in some way, and that was really transformational for me, because I thought, well, maybe I can do this. And you were very kind. You said that the work was actually pretty good, and then I had some teachers that, you know, added to that. So it started out like, you know, just like playing with words, and then it turned into a grief memoir. That's the… you know, it's evolved greatly. It turned into a grief memoir, which you—I went back to you and you said, “Well, this is great, congratulations, but it's really not marketable, and if you really want to get it out into the world, you're going to have to make some changes.” And so at that point, that's when I decided, all right, I'm going to go ahead and explore. I'm going to go deeper and try to explore the truth about what happened that day. Maybe make it more scientific, more technical; maybe bring in some of the elements that were missing from this memoir. And so along with working with you and working with my editor— Jodi Fodor—both of you, like within the last few years—I thought I had written it, I thought I was fine, I thought it was done. But then I'd come back to all of you, and you would ask me these probing questions. Perhaps I hadn't developed a scene well enough, or maybe I needed to go deeper. You know, memoir is different than what I was trained to do, and that would send me down this rabbit hole in search of answers to, you know, the questions you were asking, which, by the way, was very annoying because obviously I did not want to come to terms with, you know, the questions that you were asking, because it would, like, get me down into the feeling part of the whole memoir writing. But I did the homework, I came back with answers, and then I realized that memoir is a different animal. And I really felt that your input, your feedback, your questions, your probing, really did make it a lot richer of a story. And even through those seeking answers to the questions that you had brought me to self-discoveries, epiphanies, that perhaps… things that I had bottled up, and that even at the tail end of writing the story, there was still so much more to discover with regards to grief and healing, and which was a lesson to me that I suppose this journey never really ends.
Jennie Nash
Oh, I want to defend myself when I said, “This is great, but it's not marketable.” There is such a danger with memoir, particularly memoir around big things, and you both are writing about a big thing, and also particularly around grief, where it's so big in your own head, it takes over your whole mind or life or heart or world, that you assume that everybody else gets it. Right? Like this thing happened, and it's tragic, and in Marty's case, it reverberates through my whole life, and it's so easy to skip over the work of making that story mean something to the reader, and of just sort of resting on the fact that this dramatic thing happened in your family and your life. And there are so many manuscripts like that that when they land on the desk of an agent or the hands of a reader, it's not enough, right? It's not enough. And so that was what I was responding to you. And I know because I got to work with you, and I know from Marty, because I see the result of her finished book, you both did that really hard work, and when I say it's really hard, you just named, Rossana, why it's hard. You have to look at yourself in a way… you know you have to dig in there to things you might not really want to think about. You certainly probably don't want to feel. Do you even want to share them? All of those decisions and choices and ideas. That's what's so hard. And you both put yourself through that process. So I want to ask you each about that—what was it like? So Marty, we'll start with you. In your case, you're digging into these letters, you start then digging into the news, the articles, the pictures, the—you know, all this stuff that your mother never spoke about, and here you're digging, digging, digging. What was that like for you on an emotional level?
Marty Ross-Dolen
Ah, it took over my life for a period of time. It was very time-consuming and overwhelming, and nothing about it was easy. I spent a lot of time and tears. I had a tough time sleeping. I did a lot of the work of writing in the middle of the night. In my head, I would wake up in the middle of the night reciting something I had written the day before. It had totally taken over my brain, and fortunately, my mother is very supportive of my work and has been very supportive of the book. And while I was reading the letters—and I read them all, and there are hundreds and hundreds of letters and thousands of pages of them—my mom was available to me to have very long conversations each day through it, because I would want to share something that I read with her, check with her about a story, or she would add and fill in some cracks. And she and I spent a lot of time on the phone crying. We also spent a lot of time laughing, because my grandmother was hilarious, which helped the situation. Her letters were a joy to read. But it really—it's a commitment. It's something that anybody who decides that they're going to take on a project that's going to just sort of open up the wound and create a rawness you're not even familiar with until you're there certainly needs to have established the support system. And I also had my husband, who was incredibly willing to talk about—I mean, he's been talking about this with me and listening for, at this point, for years, but certainly all the time back then, during those days. So it's not pretty, it was hard, but there's nothing about it that doesn't feel like the biggest gift I've ever given myself, because as much as I was trying to avoid it for all those years, there was a reason. I had to do it. I had to go through the process. And also, no question, there's a healing component to writing about something like this, and that reflective writing process, when you do the deep work and try to really dig and let yourself—as Rossana was saying—you know, the annoying stuff that was really like not where you wanted to go, but that is what really changed how it helped me heal in terms of grief, but it really also changed the way I thought about the story and imagined the story, and helped me not look at it through quite as much sadness and even anger, as much as I then was able to look through more of a lens of love at all of it. And I would venture to say that Rossana may have felt that too, because I read her book, and her book is all love. So…
Jennie Nash
Yeah, so Rossana, what was that experience of writing like for you?
Rossana D’Antonio
Yeah, well, like Marty said, you know, it was, it did become all-consuming. I became obsessed. For me, though, it was the plane crash, right? The plane crash is the common thread throughout the whole book. And I would venture to say that the crash is a character itself. I like to think of it as the crash is the villain that I battle throughout the story. Everything revolves around it, and it was all-consuming. I analyzed it a million different ways. I deconstructed it. I peeled layer after layer, fact upon fact, trying to get to the core of what truly happened, right? And then I put everything back together, reconstructing it to try to make sense of it all in an effort to find out the truth, with a little bit of fear as to what I may actually find, right? There were no guarantees that I would like what I actually discovered. And as a matter of fact, you know, working with my editor—because I got so ingrained in it, because I got so weedy and geeky and just too technical—you know, she would actually slash dozens of pages, and she said, “I'm not even going to read this because this is not memoir appropriate. You need to do better.” And I think it was at that point where I had that conversation with Jody that the crash evolved from a thing to a character that I could eventually conquer. And like Marty said, there is a healing, and at the end, I actually make peace with this experience. You know, not that I'm all healed, but I make peace with it. There's really nothing I could do. My search was for the truth, and I got the truth, and then I was able to let it go and actually continue to live, because it was so consuming that I wasn't really living until I let it go.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Can I ask, Rossana, do you think that all that writing that you did that got slashed out—do you, because I have writing also that had to be removed—do you feel that that had to be written in order to be removed, in order to get on the other side of it?
Rossana D’Antonio
Oh, that's a good question. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, it could be. I mean, it's part of the quest. It wasn't appropriate for the work that I was working on, but it did highlight facts that I needed to know in order to, like you said, let it go.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Yeah, I just think that's interesting, because I have material that didn't end up in the book, but I know I couldn't have written the book if I hadn't written that material. It's just… yeah.
Jennie Nash
So you both talk about having arrived at a place of peace, or you use the word a “gift to yourself,” Marty. It sounds like during the writing of these books it didn't feel like that… it feels like that now. So why did you keep going when it was so hard? Marty, what would you say to that?
Marty Ross-Dolen
I think because even though it was hard, I was sensing that it was necessary. I was sensing the value of it, and I had just decided that I was committed to it, and I wasn't going to give up. I just had a sense that once I found myself on the other side, I would be in a place that would have made it all worth it.
Jennie Nash
What about you, Rossana?
Rossana D’Antonio
Well, I mean, for me, there are two things. I mean, people who know me know that once I say I'm going to do something, I cannot let it go. So that's one. But the whole purpose of going down this journey was I needed to know what happened. So not knowing what happened was just not an option. I mean, that was the outcome that I was looking for, and there was fear and pain that I knew I was going to take on. But in order to get there, I needed to go through it. So it was just something inevitable. I just knew what I was getting myself into. And I—you know—bring it on.
Jennie Nash
Yeah. So I want to ask about the shaping of the stories. You know, there are so many different shapes a story can take. And Rossana, we heard how you started with one type of book, moved into another. You cut this and that. And Marty, you had this incredible amount of primary source material. How did you make a decision? I mean, there are so many questions we could ask here, but I'm going to just focus on the plane crash as part of this discussion. How did you decide where in the story the crash would come—let's call it the scene of the crash—because it appears in very different places in your books, and in some ways, that colors the tone or form or experience for the reader of that book. So, Marty, how did you make that decision? Because the crash comes quite late in your book, where we actually see it. And it struck me when I was reading your book that that was exactly right for your story, because your mother never spoke about it. You didn't know about it. It wasn't a thing you were playing over in your head, and so the not feeling the crash or knowing about the crash was part of the story of it, in a way. So how did you make that decision??
Marty Ross-Dolen
I will say that the essay that I wrote in 2010 that I described as the foundational essay for the book was largely what part five of my book is. So in many ways, I had written the end of the book. That was the first thing I wrote. And then figuring out where to put what was really the largest challenge. And I ultimately started to realize that I knew that I was coming to the book with the goal of not having the book be about my grandparents’ death, but having it be about their life, particularly my grandmother's life. And so I wanted to downplay, even though the details of the accident and my discovering it were critical to the story, I wanted to downplay their death, because that's what I was trying to do for myself, because I had grown up my whole life only knowing their death, and that wasn't what I wanted people to know about myself, my mother, or my grandmother. So that was probably the biggest reason that I decided to put it at the end. And then also I put it at the end because I did want to have some buildup. I sensed some value in the reader getting to know the characters well before finding out what actually happened, and I also wanted it to correlate with my own—as you said—my own discovery of the story, which happened later in my life.
Jennie Nash
Well, then there's this—yeah, there's this cool thing that I thought was really cool that happens in your book, which is your grandparents have this magazine, this business, and they make a decision: “Oh, maybe we should see if we could get this in—was it dentist's offices or, you know, doctors' offices waiting rooms?” And then, you know, they're on this plane to try to get it on newsstands. And we know the incredible success that those ideas went on to have in terms of a business. You know, the seeds that they planted bore incredible fruit. And so that part of the story, I thought, was really beautifully handled as well, because we all know what Highlights was and what it became. And then to find out those were their ideas, and then they died. They were not the ones that saw that through. There's something so powerful about that, that their ideas were so strong. They were so prescient. They were, you know, they created this thing that reverberated—there's that word again—through so many people's lives. I thought that was really a beautiful touch to how you placed that plane crash too.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Oh, thank you. That's interesting to think of it from that perspective because, in addition to my not wanting the story to be about my grandparents’ deaths solely, it was also not meant to be the story of the history of Highlights. It was meant to be who they were. And, you know, it really is more of a focus on my grandmother in relation to the company, but they saved the company. And there were many times in the 1950s when they were struggling to keep it from bankruptcy and the decision—the sort of… actually, it was an epiphany of a salesperson who came up with the idea of selling through doctors' and dentists' offices. But their decision to implement that happened a couple of years before they died, and that's when they actually started to see the company thrive. So they died when the company was thriving, and they were, just as you said, pursuing more. Because the whole Highlights is a mission-driven company. Our whole goal is to have material that will help children become their best selves. So the more children that it touches, the more successful the mission. And so, yes, I mean, it is part of the story as much as maybe I see it as separate. It's just not separate. But making decisions about how much of one thing, you know, is this book supposed to have? I mean, there were people who wanted me to write the history of Highlights more than I did, for sure. There were people who wanted more airplane accident, for sure. And I wanted more of my grandmother, my mother, and me, so…
Jennie Nash
Right.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Yeah, it was a balance.
Jennie Nash
Right. Well, you pulled it off beautifully.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Thank you.
Jennie Nash
And Rossana, in your book, the plane crash literally starts on page one—or even in the title. How did you…? And I feel like it was maybe always that way. Was it always that way? Was that one thing that never changed?
Rossana D’Antonio
Yeah, I was just going to tell you, the book went through a ton of revisions, but the one thing that remained constant was the opening scene, which was the timeline of the 26 seconds that describe touchdown to impact. And I remember reading that in your class early on, and there was a sense of shock from the reception from the other folks in the class, and I knew that that's how I wanted to start the book. I mean, that's the premise that sets everything in motion. So that was the one constant, and I'm pretty proud of that.
Jennie Nash
Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. So we know from the very beginning what happens. And then you circle back to talk about how you learned of the crash, which is a very dramatic story as well. So how did you hold the tension through the rest of the book? When the reader knows what happened, this is not a mystery, then you have to construct the story in such a way to hold the reader—you know, what else are we going to root for or learn or find out? How did you pull that off? Because you did.
Rossana D’Antonio
Well, the mystery is, you know, what happened? The mystery—I mean, I talk about how the industry had, continues to have, a tendency to blame one individual, which is the pilot, the last person that touches this very complex system that is the aviation industry. And so I kind of made the industry somewhat of a villain. And this quest for me to seek the truth and hopefully to—you know, I suppose the reader wanted me to be right that the industry was somehow to blame. And so that's how I thread the story, in addition to the fact that, you know, there were facts that kind of reinforced my whole premise, right? I mean, the accident report was never—so the accident happened outside of the country. And so here in the United States, the NTSB will always do an investigation and release the report as public information, as a public document. But outside of the country, the accident investigation—although the NTSB and the FAA participated in it—the lead was the Salvadoran Civil Aviation Authority, and they opted not to make that investigation report public. And so to me, that screamed of a conspiracy. So I thread that into the whole story. And, you know, my family gets the report through indirect means, and I'm able to dive into it, and lo and behold, I discover smoking guns in the report that indicate that the industry lied and covered up. And there were conspiracies, which are not—they're not unique to this one accident. And that's the other thing I do in the book, is I bring in parallel accidents here in the United States that reinforce that the industry is a global industry, and that corporate greed is alive and well in this industry as well.
Jennie Nash
Yeah, indeed, your book is revelatory that way. And that leads me to a question I want to ask you both, which I'll start with you, Rossana. Given how hard it was to write the story, and to be in it, and to think about it, and how this plane crash dominated your thinking for so long, what do you think about when you step on a plane? Is it hard for you?
Rossana D’Antonio
Well, there's a little trepidation. Yes, absolutely. Every time I have to fly, there's a thinking in the back of the mind, right? I think I had a conversation with you, Jennie, where we talked about when I crossed the threshold, whether we like it or not, we are relinquishing all sense of control to those people who are flying the plane and to everybody else in the industry who helps support that pilot and co-pilot, and we have to trust that everyone has done their job. And we've discovered with recent incidents that that isn't always true. So, I mean, there are things that I do. I mean, I try to sit in the exit row. From now on, I will be sitting on 11A, you know? And, you know, I do pay attention to the safety message that the flight attendants do before we depart. I think that's a common courtesy. And by the way, you know, a lot of us feel that we're professional flyers, but we've never been tested under the most dire of conditions in an accident, so we just assume we know what to do. But do we really? And hopefully we'll never be, you know, required to put that knowledge into use. I text my husband, “We're leaving now, taking off,” and then when we land, I tell him that we've landed safe and sound, because there's no guarantee, there's no guarantee that we will make it to our destination. I like to believe—you know, we've been conditioned to believe—that flying is the safest mode of travel, and I believe that, I really do. I don't want to dispel that. I don't want to cause fear. But I do also believe that the industry is under tremendous strain. Those two things can be true at the same time. We can't just say, “I'm not going to travel.” That's just not realistic. And so I choose to trust just like my brother trusted the system when he was alive. I choose to trust the system, and we'll leave it at that.
Jennie Nash
I love that. Marty, what about you?
Marty Ross-Dolen
I find, interestingly, I have a lot more anxiety leading up to flying than actually while I'm flying. In the days before, I can't really focus. Part of it is this feeling of needing to get every little thing in order. And it just sort of takes over in my mind. So the thing that I like the least about flying is the days before I actually do it. And then I have a tradition that I insist that anybody flying with me, that I know personally, also take part in, which is that I kiss the plane, kiss my hand, and place it on the outside of the plane. I think that that's super superstitiously protective. And then I actually feel some relief once I'm in my seat that it's going to move forward. And maybe, maybe part of that is that whatever control I've had up to that point, I can let go. But I do, you know, my husband always says it's safer to fly than drive. And I think that that's true. I'm not a great passenger in a car, for sure, but I'm with Rossana. You trust the system, and you have to live, and you can't choose not to travel or not use a mode of transportation. It's just the way our society and lives are. And I guess I feel grateful and fortunate that we have those options. So, yeah.
Jennie Nash
I love that! Kiss the plane. I might start doing that. I cannot recommend both of these books more. They're so beautiful, they're so different. Reading them together would be incredibly powerful if that's something listeners are inclined to do. But just to remind folks, Marty's book is called Always There, Always Gone. Rossana's book is called 26 Seconds. Thank you both for coming on with each other to talk about this unique connection you have to each other and also your individual books. Can you tell folks where they can go to learn more other than the obvious, go-buy-the-book places? Marty, why don't you go first?
Marty Ross-Dolen
Sure. Thank you. All of my information—there's a lot to learn through my website, which is martyrossdolen.com. It's M-A-R-T-Y-R-O-S-S-D-O-L-E-N.com, where there's things to learn about Highlights, there's book club questions, there's Q&A’s, just lots of things. There are links to things I've done and all places where you can find the book.
Jennie Nash
We'll link to that in the show notes. It's just a beautiful book about mothers and daughters and grandmothers and history and our place in it, and grief and life and all of it. It's a beautiful read. And Rossana, where can people find your geeky and soulful book about your beautiful brother, Caesar [Captain Cesare D'Antonio], and his love of flying and this tragedy that unfolded and how you made sense of it? Where can they learn more?
Rossana D’Antonio
Yeah, thank you. So my website is rossanadantonio.com—that's R-O-S-S-A-N-A-D-A-N-T-O-N-I-O.com—and you can find all sorts of information there as well.
Jennie Nash
Well, thank you both for talking to me today.
Rossana D’Antonio
Thank you, Jennie. Thank you, Marty.
Marty Ross-Dolen
Thank you, Jennie. Thank you, Rossana. It's been a pleasure.
Rossana D’Antonio
It's been fun.
Jennie Nash
And for our listeners, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.
Narrator
The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe