Up in the Air

Whenever the novelist Ann Hood tells a stranger that she was a flight attendant in the late 70s, they want stories. Lucky for them, over a turbulent career spanning almost a decade, Hood amassed plenty of them, including the time she witnessed a woman in first class breastfeeding her cat.

Those were still the golden days of air travel, when much of a flight attendant’s duties, especially at the front of the airplane, was performance: carving the Chateaubriand to serve with a freshly dressed salad, placing linen napkins and glasses of champagne just so. Even in coach, prices and standards were high enough to make flying anywhere a rare, memorable event.