Amelia Earhart wrote two narratives of flight: Twenty Hrs. Forty Mins.: Our Flight in the "Friendship": The American Girl, First across the Atlantic by Air, Tells Her Story (1928); and The Fun of It (1932). Twenty Hrs. capitalizes on her celebrity status after the record-breaking flight of the Friendship on June 18, 1928. The book's production and publication was, from our point of view, startlingly swift. Earhardt finished writing the narrative on August 25, barely two months after the flight. The book hit the bookstores two weeks later, on September 10 (Ware 108). The speed with which her narrative reached the mass public testifies to the utility of narrative in the marketing of celebrity. Her publisher, Putnam, recognized what a salable commodity Earhardt had become. If the flight of the Friendship made Earhart's name a household word in Europe and the United States, then her narrative of that flight could play a critical role in catalyzing the public's romance with Amelia. Soon there would be other commercial venues of celebrity: a line of clothes and a line of airline luggage, speaking tours, and advertisements for products such as Lucky Strike cigarettes. But first there had to be narrative.

Earhardt's complex relationship to celebrity feminity is captured in the reflexive passage with which she concludes her narrative. Here she invokes the metaphor of the text as plane:

Finally the little book is done, such as it is. Tomorrow I am free to fly.

Now, I have checked over, from first to last, this manuscript of mine. Frankly, I'm far from confident of its air-worthiness, and don't know how to rate its literary horse-power or estimate its cruising radius and climbing ability. Confidentially, it may never even make the take-off.

If a crash comes, at least there'll be no fatalities. No one can see more comedy in the disaster than the author herself. Especially because even the writing of the book, like so much else of the flight and its aftermath, has had its humor--some of it publishable! (280-81)

The tone here is one of tongue-in-cheek apologetics. In pointing to her vulnerability as a writer and her competence as an aviator, Earhart reaffirms her knowledge of planes, the locus of her credibility as author; but she also reveals how critical the book is to her achievement of celebrity, in a way second only to flight itself.

Earhardt's book becomes a metaphorical plane, a form of transport technology carrying flight into the everyday life of her readers and transporting "Amelia Earhart" throughout the world as a popular icon. To maintain her public identity as aviator, she must fly; to fly, she must raise money; and to raise money, she must remain a public icon. Thus, her return home through narrative must be a return to publicity. The female aviator must become and remain a public spectacle in order to maintain her celebrity. Having lifted off the ground, Earhart can remain aloft only through the imperative of visibility politics.