In her highly anticipated new book, the author of The Trauma Cleaner meditates on what it means to believe
Fred Valentich was lost among the stars over Cape Otway in 1978. He was flying his Cessna 182 when it inexplicably vanished. His final communication to air traffic control was that he could see an unidentified aircraft circumnavigating him at high speed.
After Fred went missing, his fiancée, Rhonda, went to the cinema alone, where the new Steven Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was playing. She watched the final scene, in which long-missing pilots and sailors return to Earth, trooping out of a flying saucer. Maybe that’s what happened to Fred, she thought, and their life is merely on pause.
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If I was too comfortable I wouldn’t be writing anything worth reading, so I put myself in really awkward situations.
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