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Maggie Shipstead interview: ‘I went to the Arctic five times while writing Great Circle’
American novelist Maggie Shipstead spent seven years researching her third work of fiction, Great Circle. The result is an almost 600-page epic, about a woman who attempts to fly around the globe in 1949, and the Hollywood actress who plays her in 2015 - and finds a strange affinity with her new subject. Here, she tells us how travel, history and a fascination with flight formed the basis for her sprawling and unputdownable book.
When did you first get the idea for Great Circle?
In the fall of 2012 I was traveling in New Zealand and trying to work on a different project that I thought would be my third novel, but I lost momentum. By the end of the trip, I’d realized I needed to give it up. At the Auckland airport, there’s a statue of the pilot Jean Batten, who was the first person to fly solo from the UK to New Zealand in 1936, and a quote from her is engraved on the statue’s pedestal that says, “I was destined to be a wanderer.” For some reason something clicked, and I thought, ah ha! I will write a novel about a female pilot. I didn’t start work in earnest on Great Circle for another two years, but when I did, the very first line I wrote was “I was born to be a wanderer.”
What made you decide to make it about an aviatrix from the past and a Hollywood starlet in the present?
I had the idea for the character of Marian Graves, the pilot, before I thought of Hadley Baxter, the actress. Hadley came to me about a month after I’d started working, and I wrote a section in her voice that on the surface had no connection to Marian at all. But somehow I felt this voice was the missing piece for the book. I wanted the acidity of Hadley’s point of view to add a different tonal note to the book, and I also wanted to use Hadley to show how much of a life is lost when someone dies. Hadley’s trying to piece together who Marian was from the scraps left behind, and it’s an impossible task.
What were the different challenges that as women each of them faced?
Marian faces more overt impediments than Hadley does, mostly because of the era she’s living in. She has a feral, free-range childhood, and it doesn’t occur to her that her gender will impose any kind of limitation until she starts trying to become a pilot and no one wants to teach a girl. For her to learn to fly at all and then to maintain enough freedom to be able to fly the way she wants (i.e., not to be pulled into a domestic life) takes significant sacrifice and ongoing determination. Hadley, being very rich and very famous, can pretty much go wherever and do whatever she wants, but she’s cracking under the pressure of relentless public scrutiny. Millions of strangers think they know who Hadley is and have opinions about how she’s leading her life, and she’s in a state of profound confusion about what kind of life she actually wants.
There’s a lot of research and history in the book. Why was that important to include?
I wanted to situate Marian firmly in reality, and research was how I gathered details to bring her context to life. She’s not a stand-in for Amelia Earhart; Amelia Earhart is a real person to her. This is a book that’s highly concerned with scale – the way a single human life is both tiny and huge, the way the planet is both huge and tiny, the way a life fits into the vast span of time – and one way I tried to convey a sense of scale was to gesture toward everything happening around Marian. The development of flight, I think, is particularly astonishing, as far as its speed and the global changes it enabled. For instance, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927 in a glorified picnic basket, and then he was present at the launch of Apollo 11. What a shift in one lifetime. I wanted Great Circle to convey a sense of expansiveness and to grapple with the finitude of our lives.
What was the most unexpected or bizarre fact you uncovered?
While researching historic Montana, I came across an early 19th century real-life Native person named Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly who popped up here and there in explorers’ diaries and who appears in Great Circlein a couple different contexts. David Thompson wrote about him, as did John Franklin and a few others. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly was born a girl and married a member of David Thompson’s traveling party as a teenager, then disappeared for a while and reemerged as a man with a wife and a business selling prophecies. He had a gift for languages and worked as a translator among the tribes and between the tribes and the explorers – truly a liminal sort of person. Part of what I found so fascinating was that the Europeans’ accounts of Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, who we would now call transgender or two-spirited, are pretty unfazed by his shift in genders. I think Native people already seemed so alien to them that they weren’t particularly scandalized or threatened.
What about the traveling? Where did you go, what did you discover?
I started writing Great Circle in the fall of 2014, and I started writing for travel magazines in summer 2015. I really wanted to see the polar regions for myself because I was unconvinced I could describe them vividly and authentically just drawing from photos and from accounts by others. Over the years I was writing the book, I managed to visit Antarctica twice and the Arctic five times and developed a bit of a speciality in writing about high latitude adventure travel. So I was actively seeking to go to the places I was sending Marian on her round-the-world flight, but, also, places I happened to go – like the Cook Islands and Hawaii – had a way of finding their way into the story, too. I think I was right that I couldn’t have imagined the polar regions.
Did you ever fly in one of the planes that you describe so eloquently?
Once I’d decided I was writing a book about a pilot (and also determined that I didn’t want to take flying lessons myself), I started seeking out opportunities to fly in out-of-the-ordinary planes. I rode in a glider, and I landed on glaciers and on the Greenland ice sheet in ski-equipped planes, but the most serendipitous and fortuitous flight I took was in Missoula. I was at the little aviation museum there when two guys started wheeling out a historic aircraft. As an afterthought, one of them called back that I could come along if I wanted. They took me up for a ride around the Missoula valley in a 1927 Travel Air 6000, and because I’d now had the perfect vantage from a plane from the perfect era, I decided to make that the type of plane Marian first learns to fly.
What did writing the twin narratives of these two women teach you about living one life?
I think both these characters are asking themselves a question that everyone asks – or probably should. What do I do with my one life? How do I want to live? What do I want to see and experience? The path of least resistance isn’t always the right one (though it might be!), and I think being deliberate about the course of one’s life is an ongoing and worthwhile undertaking. After writing this book, I think I’ve become more deliberate about my own choices.
Read our exclusive extract from Great Circle:
In the spring, she learns to land at night. Lights have been installed at the airfield.
Trout teaches her to step hard on the rudder and whip around in a ground loop to avoid onrushing obstacles. She is usually close to the chalk line now, sometimes right on it.
May 1930: Amy Johnson, age twenty- six, daughter of a Yorkshire fish merchant, flies solo from Croydon Aerodrome just south of London to Darwin, Australia, in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth. Ten thousand miles in an open biplane at eighty miles per hour, always too hot or too cold, sunburned and reeking of gasoline. When she takes off she has only eightyfive hours of flying experience and no knack for landings. But she has a ground engineer’s license, knows about engines. Near Baghdad, a sandstorm forces her down, and she sits on the plane’s tail with her revolver, goggles caked with sand, listening to what might be the howling of wild dogs, might only be the wind. She breaks the speed record to Karachi but smashes a wing. Repairs take time. In Rangoon, she smashes another wing, the undercarriage, and the propeller. More repairs. The whole trip takes nineteen and a half days, the last spent fighting headwinds for five hundred miles across the Timor Sea, worrying about fuel. Then Darwin, and fame, but not the speed record she’d wanted.
As Marian’s sixteenth birthday approaches, Trout says it’s time for real mountain flying. Finally. They follow canyons, ride updrafts over ridges. Treetops whip by just under the wheels. She learns there is another landscape above the rocks and trees, an invisible topography made of wind. She learns if she flies straight at the lee side of a ridge and doesn’t rack off in time, the air will turn to quicksand, sucking her down.
To practice landings, they go to some of the wilderness strips where Trout hands off cargo to the bootleggers. She has to land short, real short.
Trout bemoans that he can’t teach her more advanced aerobatics. “The big girl’s no good for it,” he says about the Travel Air, “but you ought to have some practice. When things go wrong, you’d be calmer in your head if you were used to being turned every which way.”
“Trout says you’ve got to practice spins so you know how to get out of them,” she tells Barclay. “He says a pilot needs to learn not to panic. He says your reactions get faster.”
She knows what she is doing, what she is asking for, what will happen. In a few weeks, she arrives at the airfield and there beside the Travel Air is a brand- new bright yellow Stearman biplane. Trout’s smile hangs between his ears like a ragged hammock, but while they walk around the plane to admire its gleaming sleekness, the dashing set of its wings, he says in an undertone, “You sure about this, kid?”
She is beginning to understand how Wallace built his debts. Just this one last thing, she tells herself. Then she will be ready to start flying across the line, paying down her debt. “At least this way I’ll learn some stunts,” she tells Trout.
Trout sits in the front cockpit and Marian behind, both in helmets and goggles and parachutes, harnessed in over the shoulders. The Stearman has a stick instead of a wheel, and at fi rst she’s awkward with it. (“From the elbow, not the shoulder or you’ll pull at an angle,” Trout said on the ground. “You have to learn the feel of it.” The great unifying thesis of his instruction.) She likes the way the open cockpit fits snugly around her, how her legs extend out to meet the rudder pedals. She likes her face in the wind.
Their third time up, the stick jerks in her hand— Trout signaling he wants to take over. He climbs high, starts a dive. As Trixie Brayfogle had, he pulls up into a loop, but this time Marian is not watching the tumbling sky and ground. She watches the gauges. They level out again. Without turning to look at her, Trout raises both hands to tell her she is back in control. He’d already talked her through it: the necessary altitude and airspeed, the RPMs, the limits of all these things, the lightness and slowness she would feel at the top, the dive back toward the earth. “A loop is just another turn,” Trout says. “Only it’s flipped up on its side.”
She climbs, begins her dive.
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is out now (Doubleday)
