S3 Ep30: The Aviator & the Showman: A Conversation with Laurie Gwen Shapiro

So much of Amelia Earhart’s story lives in the spaces between facts—the hours unaccounted for, the voices never heard again, the enigmatic whispers of survival. Those unanswered questions keep us chasing, keep us listening for what might still be found.

Over this rebrand, we’ve traced radio logs, scoured sonar scans off remote atolls, sat with the families who watched the world collectively hold its breath in July of 1937. We’ve pushed beyond accepted timelines, challenged the orthodox accounts. Each step has carried us further from the airport in Oakland and closer to the moment when time itself seemed to slip through her fingers.

Today, we shift our focus—not to new sonar anomalies or grid searches—but to the power of storytelling itself, and the women who champion it. We welcome a guest whose entire career has orbited around truth-telling.

She’s a journalist, writer, and documentarian - someone who has long been fascinated by how stories shape us—and how we shape them in turn. Her work spans genres, subjects, decades. Whether she’s exploring women's inner lives or investigating hidden histories, her lens is always clear, and always curious.

In her new book, she turns her attention to reckoning with the unknown—not in search of wreckage or coordinates, but to dig into the emotional fallout, the cultural aftershocks that reverberate long after an airplane ever disappears. She’s been asking questions like, "How do we grieve someone we never knew?" "How does a myth persist when facts remain elusive?"

Over the last season, we’ve heard from explorers, navigators, and forensic experts all alike. We’ve tracked timelines, re‑evaluated eyewitness accounts, and examined cryptic newspaper clippings reeking of both desperation and hope. All the while, we’ve felt the pull of Earhart’s silhouette—her strength, her ambition, her solitude, and the void she left behind.

Tonight, we step back. We step into the stories left untold: letters never sent home, journals never written, and the echo of words like ‘we’re running low’ drifting in static. We’ll talk about mortality, myth-making, and memory. About how the flight of one aviatrix became a collective heartbeat for generations. Tonight's guest journey into that runway of remembrance might just teach us more about our own need to chase—to connect, to understand, to grieve.

It’s part reflection, part excavation. But we’re not chasing debris this time. We’re chasing meaning.

So, whether you’ve been with us since the very first broadcast, or this is your first descent into Earhart’s world, stay with me. Because these are the stories that don’t end in a disappearance. They begin to live anew—in the telling.

Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From New York City, this is Laurie Gwen Shapiro.

LINKS:

• Our Website
• Vanished on Twitter
• Vanished on Instagram
• Vanished on TikTok
• Vanished Facebook Discussion Group
• Chasing Earhart on Facebook
• Chasing Earhart on Twitter

SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING:

• Laurie's Official Website
• The Aviator & the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon @ Amazon
• Laurie on Instagram
• Laurie on Twitter
• Laurie on Facebook
• 'Amelia Earhart’s Complicated Legacy and Horrible Husband' @ The NY TImes
• ‘The Aviator and the Showman’ Review: A Marriage in the Clouds' @ WSJ