From the Ashes of a Plane Crash Rises a Hero

People love talking about themselves, this is a given fact. They want to feel heard and important. We gravitate towards others like us. And, when we cannot talk about ourselves, we read about ourselves. That is the reason why I connected so deeply with the book, In the Unlikely Event, by Judy Blume. The main character, Miri Ammerman, was fifteen, like myself at the time, and was struggling to cope with the three plane crashes that took place in Elizabeth, New Jersey during the Korean War. In the midst of high school and family drama, I saw parallels between myself and the main character, enabling new emotions of empathy to pour between the pages. As Miri made mistakes, she learned to grow from her actions and over time, evolved into a mature adult.

A great way to immerse myself in a book is to connect to the main character. When I see similarities, I am more likely to turn the page and continue reading. When I read about Miri, the similarities were striking. Both of us were born in January, both of us were fifteen, both of us loved to write, and both of us grew up without a father. Throughout the novel, Miri struggles to grow up and learn who she is. One characteristic about Miri that made me see her as a person and not a fictional character was the fact that she made mistakes as the novel goes on. She does not tell her mother about her father’s attempts to enter himself into her life, she is almost expelled for writing a risqué article in her school newspaper, and she has a haircut that she immediately regrets. Through these mistakes, Miri grows as a person and matures from a child to a young adult. Personally, I do not think that there is a single day that goes by for myself without making some sort of mistake. Whether these mistakes were miniscule, like giving myself bangs, or life altering, like agreeing to live on a boat, cut off from the world for a month, it is because of these mistakes that I grew into the person that I am today. These constant mistakes allowed me to relate to Miri, because I saw a character that was not perfect. She screwed up, too. Miri comes to the realization that at the end of the day, life goes on. As each plane explodes into the ground mere miles away from Miri herself or her home, Miri’s life begins to crumble. The plane crashes give her a new grasp on reality; life is short. In fact, life is too short to let your mistakes dominate your life. Miri decides on her own whether to keep in touch with her father, she continues to attend school and write on her own, and she learns to live with her bad haircut. However, it is not her mistakes that define Miri, it is how she grows from her mistakes that shape her into the woman she becomes.

After the third plane crash in Elizabeth, Miri begins to have trouble sleeping. Her dentist realizes Miri has anxiety after discovering she grinds her teeth in her sleep. To me, this was understandable given Miri’s age, and the fact that she had witnessed dead bodies pulled out of wreckage and rubble. Miri’s best friend pulls away from her, and her mother begins dating again. She is under immense pressure from all of those around her to keep a strong façade, but late at night the mask falls and Miri begins to break down. At the climax of the story, with Miri feeling powerless to change her own life, I was appalled. Here was a fictional character, suffering from her own personal demons, just as I had been. Throughout high school, I felt as though I was the only student struggling with my family, but this story gave me hope that I was not alone. Mental health is definitely a silent issue in schools; rarely is a student’s mental health discussed. I falsely assumed that I was the only student struggling to cope with my anxiety, but Miri proved that many students in high school experience anxiety. No other book has slapped me in the face with empathy like the book In the Unlikely Event has. I have been heartbroken like Miri, I have numerous sleepless nights due to anxiety like Miri, and I have felt hopeless like Miri. Similar to Miri learning to grow from her mistakes, this book also gifts readers with witnessing Miri learn to overcome her anxiety from the plane crashes. At the end of the book, Miri even overcomes her fear of flying and is able to fly from Las Vegas to New Jersey. While I may not have overcome my phobias, such as my fear of birds, my anxiety has reduced from high school. I have changed so much from when I was fifteen, from how I view myself to how I write. As Miri grew, I grew along her side. Reading about Miri’s anxiety helped me come to terms with my own anxiety, and made me gain a new appreciation as a reader, for characters that had the same struggles that I did.

As a reader, I learned how it feels to truly connect with a character. As a writer, I learned how to make readers immerse themselves into your work: make your characters human. Have your characters make mistakes, big mistakes, too. Allow your characters to be stupid and foolish. Giving your characters humanistic, real qualities creates a new dynamic between the reader and the writer that allows for growth and the ability to evolve. Had Miri never made those mistakes on her journey of growing up, I never would have been able to relate to her character; and I never would have seen myself through her, allowing myself to truly feel her emotions as raw and real as they were written. Miri’s moral dilemma of speaking up about not only her mistakes but her anxiety as well resonated with me. This girl lived through her trauma, and blossomed from it. As I have matured from a high school freshman to a college freshman, I have learned that the ability to move on from our past is a beautiful gift. Moving on has given me the power of empathy, and all I can hope to accomplish is to be able to help someone as Miri has been able to help me. Miri, you are my hero.