Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too. I knew the horizon could never be caught but still chased it. What I have done is foolish; I had no choice but to do it.

Great Circle was the only one of my three novels where I knew the title from the beginning. I knew the title, and I knew that the heart of the book would be a pilot, a woman, who disappears while trying to fly around the world north-south, over the poles. Beyond that, I didn’t know much else. I’m incapable of plotting out my books before I start writing them, and so I simply have to leap . . . and hope for the best. This excerpt from Marian’s logbook was truly the first piece of the novel that I wrote—as in, Day 1—and although I went back and tinkered with it over the more than five years I spent writing and revising, for the most part it remained as I originally wrote it: an anchor for the rest of the text, an inflection point to which I would circle back both literally and figuratively, and a touchstone for my own concept of Marian. Here was her voice, speaking out with directness and intensity during a moment when she is facing her own probable death. She is a woman who is compelled to do something beautiful and dangerous and, in some ways, pointless. If she succeeds in circling the earth, she will have delivered herself back to the place where she began. And why? She doesn’t quite know. She’s not sure it matters why. What matters is the power of her impulse, her instinct to go. Many times in writing a novel, you ask yourself about your own characters, who is this person? I went back to this short passage when I needed to remind myself that Marian is a person who would write these things.

I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.

The full meaning of this line can’t be unpacked without certain spoilers (after you finish the book, read this first section again and see if it sits differently with you), but I will say that when Marian sets out on her flight, she is hoping for a new vantage on the world, for a sense of profound accomplishment and satisfaction, and for a new peace with herself. She gets fragments and flashes of these things and experiences transcendent, sublime beauty, but she also has to contend with excruciating sacrifices and decisions. Was the flight worth it? In this moment, she has no way of answering that question. Perhaps it can’t be answered.

Life gives you lemons, you carve off their skins and garnish your martinis.

Hadley loves a bon mot. She’s a little bit Old Hollywood in this way, like a tough talking Mae West-type starlet, full of wry quips. She also has a hardness to her, at least externally, and she doesn’t shy away from harsh, even violent language. Life hands Hadley a metaphorical lemon, and she’s going to take her metaphorical revenge on that poor citrus with the sharpest knife she can find, and then she’s going to gloat about it.

Closure doesn’t really exist, though. That’s why we’re always looking for it.

Part of the reason Hadley loves a bon mot is that she’s attracted to certainty and to distillation. Hadley is looking for answers: about herself, about everything. But, at this period in her life, it’s also dawning on her that certainty is hard to come by, and, when it arrives, it doesn’t always stick around. (Certainty, in my opinion, should generally be regarded with suspicion.) Here, Hadley is somewhat cynically offering Bart what he wants to hear—a concise reason for why she wants to do her own stunt that is, at best, a partial truth. I think her conclusion that closure doesn’t exist reflects a realization that even if we gain wisdom and perspective on something that’s happened to us or find relief from psychological or emotional pain, that doesn’t mean that past event is suddenly and permanently neutralized. Rather, what we might in the moment perceive as closure is actually part of a longer, more dynamic process, a quite possibly lifelong evolution in the way we perceive our own pasts. After all, our pasts are constantly being recontextualized by the accrual of more and more life. The dream of closure, like the horizon, is ever-present but also ever-elusive.

She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.

One of the challenges in writing a novel that covers the entirety of a character’s life is that you must create a human being who is recognizable and reasonably consistent from birth through death. The character must always be herself, but she must also change according to her experiences, her growth, and the pressures of her time. As I said in my first note, I started out with a snippet of Marian’s adult voice from just before her disappearance; then I moved backwards all the way to her infancy and started building back toward that voice, that person who is about to take off from Antarctica and vanish. This moment, when it first occurs to Marian that airplanes are the perfect vessels for all her instincts toward freedom and movement, is an important, defining node in her trajectory. She is still a child, but this pull she feels toward flight will shape the rest of her life.

He could not make peace with the magnitude of suffering in the world. It registered in him as a wave of heat and tingling, an acceleration in his heart and a lightness in his head—a sensation both puny and unbearable. The only way to live was to shut it out, but even when he turned his thoughts away, he was still aware of it, as one who lives alongside a levee is aware of the deluge waiting on the other side.

None of my characters are me, but, also, they’re all me in that they’re products of my consciousness. This aspect of Jamie is something I drew from my own struggles to find a way not to be overwhelmed by what horrifies me. It’s a difficult balance for many or most of us, I think, to be responsibly informed about the bad things that happen in the world without becoming paralyzed by dread and grief. Because what good does that do? (This is such a cheerful note!) Jamie is a gentle soul, and the depth and expansiveness of his compassion for living creatures means it’s not always easy to be him.

I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.

In his book The Art of Travel, the philosopher Alain de Botton writes that memory is “an instrument of simplification and selection.” He describes how a simple phrase and idea like “a journey through an afternoon” actually elides a tremendous volume of real but mundane experiences: our senses are active at all times; our minds and emotions are working; an external world is sliding by the train/car/plane windows. We are processing information every second of that journey, but at the end we may retain only a few concrete memories—and after a little more time has passed, maybe none. I read this after Great Circle was published, and Botton’s thinking reminded me of how, on her flight, Marian experiences discovery and loss concurrently. She has always craved more of the world, has longed to witness as much as she can. But she also knows her mind is incapable of retaining and preserving the vastness of the present. In some ways, the limitations of memory are merciful. Imagine how overwhelming it would be to remember literally everything! Instead, our experiences must fall away from us, leaving behind the strange, unreliable distillation that we call memory.

She hadn’t anticipated how much of her behavior after marriage would be motivated by a wish not to argue.

Oh, Marian. She really thought she could enter into a Faustian bargain with Barclay and come out unscathed. Then she thought she could outsmart marriage itself! She underestimated the weight and grind of Barclay’s pressure on her to conform to his idea of a wife, how exhausting and unsustainable it would be to resist and how little power she would retain. It’s just easier, ultimately, to go along with his wishes, even if that yielding is eroding her soul. For his part, Barclay was drawn to Marian partly because of her feralness and her freedom, and he doesn’t understand that domesticating her won’t actually be a victory for him because he will crush her into someone very different from the woman he so desperately wanted in the first place. He wants to possess someone who doesn’t want to be possessed, and that is an unresolvable conflict of interest.

One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both.

If I do say so myself, this seems pretty true. Our relationships don’t exist in vacuums; they shape the course of our day-to-day lives and our concepts of our futures. When a relationship ends, it can be profoundly disorienting to have to reimagine our lives on top of reckoning with the sudden absence of a previously important person. His love for Sarah Fahey had opened Jamie up to a more ambitious idea of his future than he’d dared to entertain before, and losing her has pulled his new hopes out from under him. As he tells Marian, he’s grieving that vision, but we have to hope that the ways in which Sarah broadened his world will persist. That’s the best case scenario, generally, right? That we take the best parts of a relationship, the ways we’re changed for the better, with us?

We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we’re just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination.

Hadley, in her love life, is a little bit like Alice in Wonderland, drinking potions and eating cakes that make her too big, then too small, always trying to correct for whatever feeling she doesn’t want to feel. Basically, she has baggage. She also doesn’t know what she wants, so she’s living impulse-to-impulse, searching for something (she doesn’t know what) and creating a bigger and bigger mess as she goes. Living with perfect control and intentionality is neither possible nor probably desirable, but Hadley is starting to understand that she needs to take a step back and ask herself what kind of life she wants to lead.

To find the essence of Antarctica, she has an instinct it must be confronted alone. Or maybe the essence of the place is too large and empty for anyone to grasp, no matter how stark a confrontation is made. Maybe that is the appeal of Antarctica, the itch of it. She thinks of Jamie painting infinite space, knowing infinite space could not be painted.

When I started writing Great Circle, in the fall of 2014, I had been to the High Arctic once, to Svalbard, on a trip for artists. I would never say that writers MUST go to the places they write about—often this is simply not feasible—but it was important to me to try my hardest to see the places Marian would land on her flight. I didn’t think I could fully imagine Antarctica without actually going there, and, in retrospect, I believe I was correct. Mostly through assignments for travel magazines, by the time Great Circle was published, I had been to the Arctic five more times and to Antarctica twice, once to the remote Ross Sea region where Marian makes her final stop and once to the more commonly visited Antarctic Peninsula. Both of those trips, however, were made by ship, and I was aware that the interior of Antarctica is an entirely different beast than its coast. I wanted to experience what it would be like to stand in the middle of an ice sheet, as Marian does. While getting to the Antarctic interior proved impossible, I did manage—on assignment—to land in a plane in the middle of Greenland’s ice sheet. I will never forget the feeling of standing atop thousands of feet of ice, with a perfect white disc stretching to the horizon all around me and a perfect dome of blue sky overhead. In that moment, I felt connected to the whole shape and scale of the planet—a feeling Marian is always chasing—and also aware of how impossible it is to fully grasp that scale. In some ways, writing this book was my version of what Jamie’s trying to do: to express something about inexpressibility, about too-bigness, and about awe.

Acknowledgments

My next book, You Have a Friend in 10A, which will be published in May 2022, is a collection of short stories told in disparate voices and set in disparate locales. I wrote them over ten years, beginning when I was in graduate school and going up through the time when I was writing Great Circle. One thing I love about being a writer is having the opportunity to learn about new subjects, experiment with style, and explore different lives, times, and places. These stories reflect how happy I’ve been to indulge my wandering curiosity, especially in the shorter form, which doesn’t require a multi-year commitment to each project. I find that my writing builds on itself. The collection’s title story is written in a movie star’s voice that became a prototype for the voice of Hadley Baxter; the sustained first-person intensity of that story gave me the confidence to add the modern Hollywood thread to Great Circle. “Souterrain” is a story in which I had to manage a complex structure, just as in Great Circle, and “La Moretta” is about a honeymooning couple realizing their marriage is a terrible mistake, a feeling that would have been familiar to the newly married Marian Graves. If you enjoyed Great Circle, I think you will recognize some of its roots in these stories. Hopefully, you will find sources of new curiosity, too, as I did writing them. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58988174-you-have-a-friend-in-10a