Author Maggie Shipstead’s takes flight in ‘Great Circle’

There was a time when Maggie Shipstead thought she was going to release a novel every year. Then along came Jean Batten.

“I saw the statue of her and thought I wanted to write a story about a female pilot,” recalls Shipstead from her home in Los Angeles.

What could have just been an incidental encounter with an airport statue of New Zealand’s most famous aviator turned into a seven-year journey that recently culminated in “Great Circle,” Shipstead’s sprawling novel about a female aviator and the actress cast to play her in a movie almost a century later.

It would take Shipstead another couple years to begin a draft of what would become “Great Circle.” Then a year went by. Then another.

“I was two years into writing the first draft and I’d written about 400 pages, and it dawned on me that I wasn’t even halfway through,” Shipstead recalls, adding that she feared that readers would forget about her after releasing two acclaimed bestsellers. “That was a dark moment. Other people were publishing books and you get this sense that if you don’t do something soon, you’ll become irrelevant.”

Luckily, Shipstead pushed the negative thoughts aside.

“Really, nobody cares about that when it comes to novelists,” Shipstead says. “When you publish a book after seven years, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s her.’”

Since the book’s release in early May, the attention it and Shiphead have received has been much more than a simple “Oh, yeah, it’s her.” The dual story of a daredevil pilot (Marian Graves) and a struggling actress (Hadley Baxter), “Great Circle” received stellar reviews and became an instant bestseller. It’s rare that a book can be described as both a “feminist epic” and a “perfect summer novel,” but Shipstead has skillfully crafted a compelling novel that blends both historical fiction and modern-day travails.

The book itself begins with an ending of sorts. That is, with Marian’s final journal entry in 1950 as she’s about to take off to complete a flight over Antarctica. It then jumps ahead to 2014 with Hadley on the set of a movie where she’s playing Marian at that time in her life. What follows is difficult to encapsulate succinctly, with each woman’s life laid out over nearly 600 pages, intertwining in unexpected ways and over multiple continents and time periods.

Considering the way in which the novel is sectioned out, with chapters devoted to Hadley seamlessly blending into the parts about Marian — with brief interludes that spotlight supporting and historical characters — it’s surprising to learn that Shipstead had no idea how the two protagonist’s journeys would intersect when she first began the novel.

“That was one of the hardest parts, joining Marian and Hadley in a way that, to me, felt satisfying,” Shipstead says. “I always had the threads of the book, but I didn’t know where they were going.”

Sure, there are commonalities Marian and Hadley share (both are orphans raised by uncles, both are struggling against a patriarchal system), but Shipstead fluidly builds the two women’s parallel journeys, revealing piece-by-piece that they have more in common than what’s initially on the surface.

“We were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles,” Shipstead writes as Hadley in one passage. “She was like me but wasn’t. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky.”

Shipstead builds their worlds with the deftness of a fantasy writer and cleverly inserts suspense with the precision of a master thriller writer. The result is both poetic and precise, grounded and glorious. What’s more, Shipstead effortlessly changes her tone and writing style in order to give each character their own distinct narrative.

She says this still presented challenges. She’d often finish a section on one character, only to come back later and have to revert back to another voice.

“It was challenging to keep it calibrated correctly,” says Shipstead, who edited her original 800-plus word first draft down over the course of a year. “Like when I would go back to write a Hadley section after not having written one for a while. I would have to reread the earlier ones to get her back in my ear.”

Another challenge was learning about pre- and post-World War II aviation, when Marian’s storyline takes place. Shipstead credits her brother, an Air Force pilot, as being particularly helpful with some of the initial fact-checking, but says she also immersed herself in books written by pilots, as well as technical manuals.

This immersion into the world of one of her characters is hardly surprising considering Shipstead grew up wanting to be an anthropologist. She was specifically drawn to Egyptology while growing up in Orange County, but found that she didn’t have the sensibility for it once she started her studies at Harvard University. She switched her major to English and took a fiction writing class “on a whim.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing but I enjoyed it so I took another one the next year,” says Shipstead, who often visits the San Diego region to visit her parents in Coronado. “I thought I was OK for a college student, but I still didn’t think it was at all viable to be a writer.”

Like many would-be writers, she wasn’t sure what her next step should be after graduation. She applied to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop program, assuming she would not get in, but she did.

“It was there that I really began incorporating the idea of being a writer into my identity and think about it as being maybe viable,” Shipstead says.

After the success of her first two novels, “Seating Arrangements” (2012) and “Astonish Me” (2014), Shipstead was offered a travel writing story and found that she liked the experience enough to become a regular contributor to publications such as Condé Nast Traveler and Departures. Along with her encounter with the statue of Jean Batten at the Auckland airport, it was Shipstead’s multiple trips to the Arctic and Antarctic that informed much of Marian’s narrative in “Great Circle.”

“They are both just wild, ungovernable places,” says Shipstead, who uses metaphorical comparisons to the region to describe the respective spirits of the book’s protagonists. “I think sometimes, in my experience, people get scared or startled by the total indifference of the place.”

One of the more relatable themes within “Great Circle” is how the two protagonists navigate worlds that are male-dominated (aviation, in the case of Marian) and toxically misogynistic (Hollywood culture, in the case of Hadley). Shipstead wanted to present both characters as having to deal with patriarchal double standards that remain the norm despite the fact their storylines take place a century apart.

“The feminist issues in the book are relevant now and across time,” Shipstead says. “There’s always this balance of not wanting to be anachronistic, but also wanting to say that it’s a fact that people have always had some of the same concerns we have now.”

In the case of Hadley, being cast to play Marian presents an opportunity for a comeback of sorts. After starring in a film franchise where she ended up dating her co-star (think Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in the “Twilight” series), Hadley finds herself shunned in Hollywood after seemingly cheating with a pop star. The book gracefully explores the gendered hypocrisies of Hollywood culture and celebrity, including incidents of phone hacking, leaked photos and #MeToo-style sexual improprieties.

“With Hadley, I was looking for some concrete connections between her and Marian,” Shipstead says. “She’s pretty self-interested, so I wanted there to be these little tantalizing commonalities that, for her, would feel like a sign from the universe that she should care about Marian or that there’s something in it for her.”

Given the immediate success of “Great Circle,” it’s surprising to learn that Shipstead already has a collection of short stories coming out next year (“You Have a Friend in 10-A,” referring to a seat number on a plane). She’s also already begun drafting a “family drama” set in L.A., but admits it will be decidedly “less ambitious.”

“I like writing about different things and really changing gears with each project,” Shipstead says. “I can’t imagine trying to replicate ‘Great Circle’ or taking on another huge, research-based epic novel.”

She laughs, adding, “I’m just going to try to take a little less than seven years.”

“Great Circle” by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf, 2021; 608 pages)