It’s a really obvious explanation and anything else would be extremely unlikely, but I think it’s interesting that this pseudo mystery has persisted for so long. I was interested in Amelia Earhart, partly because-to me, and I think to a lot of people-it seems abundantly clear that she crashed into the ocean and drowned that that’s by far the most likely scenario. When you did start writing it, what other women aviators did you look to for the story? I didn’t really start writing it for another two years-until fall of 2014-but I had it in my head as my next project during that time. And so I saw the statue of Jean Batten and that quote from her on it-that “I was destined to be a wanderer.” And I thought, “Oh, I should write a book about a female pilot.” For some reason, that struck me as inarguable. So by the time I got to the airport in Auckland to go home, I was feeling a little dejected and open to ideas. And during that time, the novel I thought I was going to write just died on me. Seating Arrangements had come out and I was in edits for Astonish Me, and I had brought the beginning of another novel with me on the trip. How did the idea for Great Circle come about?īack in 2012, when I first started traveling by myself, I sort of puttered around the South Island for three weeks.
We sat down with the writer to learn more about her inspiration behind the book and how she folded in her own real-life travel experiences. Shipstead is best known for her two previous novels-her bestselling debut, 2012’s Seating Arrangements, and 2014’s Astonish Me, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize-and says she’d been working loosely on another novel when she had the idea for Great Circle.
We feel their closeness as they share similar struggles and ambitions. Even though the two women are separated by time and geography, we come to know more about each one through alternating perspectives: Marian’s story told in third person, Hadley’s in first. It is hardly surprising, then, that I tore through my copy of Maggie Shipstead’s ambitious new novel, Great Circle-our May AFAReads selection-which weaves together the stories of two women: famous aviator Marian Graves, who disappears on a flight to the north and south poles, and actress Hadley Baxter, who is hired a century later to portray Marian in a film. At a time when I wasn’t flying, soaring and spinning through the sky via the escapades of these women was a fitting substitute-no airsickness included. Off I went, full throttle into the achievements and legacies of women pilots like Florence Klingensmith, Amy Johnson, and Katherine Cheung. I’d known of Bessie Coleman and Amelia Earhart, sure, but as I learned more about Bland, I realized how unfamiliar I was with the myriad other women who had made aviation history. In 2020, I spent months researching the life of pioneering aviator Lilian Bland.
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