Spunky heroine, air piracy enliven Gillespie’s novel

Her spunky 14-year-old heroine, April, survives decompression, invades the cockpit from a secret trap door in the cargo bay, and finds the safest place for a bomb to detonate on an old L-1011.

This is the kind of kid who knows how to use a car jack to escape from a locked trunk and can fashion a thermic lance from a curling iron. Early in the book, April, who spends many boring hours on cross-country flights, shuttling between her divorced parents, passes the time with “unaccompanied minor” fellow traveler Malcolm by quizzing him on death tolls, wind shear and other details of famous air crashes of the past.

Gillespie explains that she barely needed to crack open Wikipedia to recall most of the gory details. “I am Rain Man when it comes to plane wrecks,” said Gillespie, 52, hoisting a cup of hand-crafted java at Grant Park’s painfully trendy Octane coffee bar.

Her obsession springs from a deep fear of flying: Studying what went wrong in the past helps the phobic traveler gain some symbolic control of the situation. The fact that a flight attendant might be afraid of flying is nothing new, said Gillespie, who put on the apron and pushed the cart for the last time in 2012.

“Plenty of flight attendants are afraid to fly.” Gillespie’s way of coping with terror was to whistle a happy a tune. “I made myself behave as if I didn’t have the fear.”

Of course, in her book, something major does goes wrong on WorldAir Flight 1021, involving kidnapping, hijackers, a bomb and a treacherous stepfather, and it is up to April, Malcolm and his emotional support dog Captain Beefheart to save the day.

Gillespie will speak and sign books Jan. 9 at the Barnes & Noble in the Edgewood shopping center near Little Five Points.

Her “young adult” audience at that event may be a different demographic than those who’ve enjoyed her salty columns at Creative Loafing and Atlanta Magazine and her unfettered personal confessions in books with such demure titles as “Confessions of a Recovering Slut” and “Trailer Trashed.”

Those tales feature bad choices, bad behavior and bad neighborhoods, all played for laughs and the occasional poignant tear. Interestingly, “Unaccompanied Minor” doesn’t differ dramatically in tone from Gillespie’s earlier work. Her adolescent hilarity perseveres in the new genre, into which she decided to dive as a way of shaking things up.

“I knew I had to make a change,” she says, peering through horn-rimmed glasses, her blond hair tied up in a heart-splashed headband. “One of the reasons I’ve survived as a writer is I keep mutating.”

In addition to NPR columns and speaking engagements, the hardworking Gillespie also coaches aspiring novelists in what she calls Shocking Real Life writing seminars. One of the things she tells her students is not to tone down their stories for fear of offending.

“The first two books are saturated with very creative profanity,” she says. “Unaccompanied Minor” is more restrained, but still pure Gillespie. Her mentor and publisher Jacquelyn Mitchard told her that young adult writers can’t pretend to be teenagers. They must write like themselves, and Gillespie’s voice is audible throughout, though without the profanity of her earlier works.

There’s something else new: Gillespie is not just worried about plane crashes these days. Her protagonist is overpowered, knocked out, trussed-up in zip-tie handcuffs and tossed in the trunk of a car. Gillespie shows us how April escapes from these dangers, using knowledge she gained after her own daughter grew up to become a precociously tall 13-year-old.

“You can learn a lot in this book, like how to escape from a trunk,” she says. “I didn’t worry about that until I had a 5-foot-10 daughter who looks like a runway model.”