Dear Reader,
While I was writing Great Circle, my third novel, a friend asked me if I could describe what it was about in one word. I replied without hesitation: scale. It’s about the dimension of a life versus that of the planet, two things that, depending on how you look at them, can be understood as either tiny or vast. Given more words, I would have said that Great Circle is about a pilot, a woman named Marian Graves, who disappears in Antarctica in 1950 while attempting to fly around the world north-south, and it’s about how her story intersects with that of a modern movie star playing her in a biopic. I would have tried to explain that the book is about Marian’s lost parents and her twin brother and her unusual upbringing in Montana and her love affairs and her driving impulse toward freedom, and I would have said it’s about aviation and Hollywood and war and telling stories and how disappearance and death are often the same but feel different to those left behind.
This novel is not autobiographical, but, inevitably, it is a reflection of my inner life: what I think about, what I care about, and how I understand and imagine my fellow humans. Great Circle is partly intended, too, as a love letter to our magnificent, fragile planet. In the years I was writing the book, I travelled widely, especially to the places I would eventually send Marian. I lived in Missoula, Montana for two months. I visited Antarctica and Alaska and the High Arctic and the South Pacific and elsewhere, though so many elsewhere remain. I am not a pilot, but I found opportunities to ride in gliders and vintage planes, to land on ice caps and tiny tropical islands. Marian’s yearning to see as much as she can of the world is something I share, as is the poignance of knowing it will never be enough.
If I were to pick a second word to explain what Great Circle is about, it would be freedom. Freedom is precious, and I believe we will all emerge from this time of quarantine identifying more strongly than ever with Marian’s urge to take flight, to go.
Thank you in advance from the bottom of my heart for helping this book find its way. I’m honoured by everyone who chooses to read Great Circle.
Maggie Shipstead
Leave a Reply