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.
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