Mostly Books Meets...

This week, Jack is joined by author Maggie Shipstead to discuss her novel Great Circle. Great Circle was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction and Maggie has also penned two previous novels, 2012s Seating Arrangements, and 2014s Astonish Me. More recently, she's released a collection of short stories called You Have a Friend in 10A.

Show Notes

This week, Jack is joined by author Maggie Shipstead to discuss her novel Great Circle. Great Circle was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction and Maggie has also penned two previous novels, 2012s Seating Arrangements, and 2014s Astonish Me. More recently, she's released a collection of short stories called You Have a Friend in 10A.

Purchase Great Circle here

(1:56) Growing up in Orange County and Reading Books
(11:46) Writing and an MFA
(15:55) Maggie's Recent Reads
(26:48) Maggie's Travels and the Inspirations for Great Circle
(48:09) A Book That Changed Maggie Shipstead's Life
(56:51) Great Circle

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a weekly podcast by the independent award-winning bookshop, Mostly Books. Nestled in the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon-on-Thames, Mostly Books has been spreading the joy of reading for fifteen years. Whether it’s a book, gift, or card you need the Mostly Books team is always on hand to help. Visit our website.

The podcast is produced and presented by Jack Wrighton and the team at Mostly Books. It is edited by Story Ninety-Four. Find us on Twitter @mostlyreading & Instagram @mostlybooks_shop.

Meet the host:
Jack Wrighton is a bookseller and social media manager at Mostly Books. His hobbies include photography and buying books at a quicker rate than he can read them.
Connect with Jack on Instagram

Great Circle is published in the UK by Penguin.

Books mentioned in this episode include:
Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead - ISBN: 9780007467730
Persuasion by Jane Austen - ISBN: 9780199535552
The Martian by Andy Weir - ISBN: 9781785031137
I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy - ISBN: 9781982185824
Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler - ISBN: 9780099731818

To find more titles, visit our website

Creators & Guests

Host
Mostly Books
Award-winning indie bookshop in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

What is Mostly Books Meets...?

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a podcast by the independent bookshop, Mostly Books. Booksellers from an award-winning indie bookshop chatting books and how they have shaped people's lives, with a whole bunch of people from the world of publishing - authors, poets, journalists and many more. Join us for the journey.

Sarah Dennis 0:24
Welcome to Mostly Books Meets with the team at Mostly Books, an award-winning independent bookshop in Abingdon. In this podcast series, we'll be speaking to authors, journalists, poets, and a range of professionals from the world of publishing. We'll be asking about the books that are special to them from childhood favourites to the book that changed their life and we hope you'll join us for the journey.

Jack Wrighton 1:08
It's our great pleasure to welcome you onto the podcast this week author Maggie Shipstead. Now I would like to make it clear we don't have favourites here at Mostly Books. However, sometimes a book comes along that you relish so much it begins incorporating itself into your personality, such as the case with Maggie's gorgeous novel Great Circle. Many an unsuspecting customer has had a copy thrust into their hands, followed by a garbled but enthusiastic recommendation from either me or my colleague, Aileen. Great Circle was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction and Maggie has also penned two previous novels, 2012s Seating Arrangements, and 2014s Astonish Me. More recently, she's released a collection of short stories called You Have a Friend in 10a, Maggie Shipstead, welcome to Mostly Books Meets.

Maggie Shipstead 1:56
Thanks for having me.

Jack Wrighton 1:58
Our absolute pleasure. So as I'm sure you're aware, on the podcast, we talk to authors, we talk to people throughout the industry about the books that they love and we always like to start with childhood and to know a little bit about where you grew up, and what life was like for young Maggie.

Maggie Shipstead 2:18
Sure. Well, I grew up in Southern California. I live in LA now but I grew up a bit south of there in Orange County, now famous for The Real Housewives,

Jack Wrighton 2:27
Oh yes.

Maggie Shipstead 2:30
Pretty different in the mid-80s. My mom was a child development professor and my dad was a lawyer. He's retired now and yeah, I had like a nice suburban life and when I was a little bit older, I guess like seven or eight, we moved further out into an area that was just being developed. So it was really mostly kind of open Chaparral Hills and lived there until I left for college and my parents live in San Diego now. So yeah, I was always a big, big reader, you know, as the kid who got in trouble at school for hiding under a table to read. My mom always encouraged it, you know, and read to read to me and my brother from when we were tiny.

Jack Wrighton 3:18
Yeah. If you're going to be rebellious in any way, as a kid, it's kind of I mean, I can imagine the least for the parents, the best way to be is through just really liking reading, that's a very sort of, like, wholesome rebellious thing to have and in terms of, you know, when, when you're reading when you're younger, what types of things were you reaching for? Did you enjoy sort of the stories about kind of, you know, everyday kids and like the people that you could relate to? Or was it going into fantasy? What was the type of thing that you enjoyed?

Maggie Shipstead 3:50
I read all kinds of stuff. A book that stands out, which I think I mentioned to you, as this novel called All the Kind Family and it was a novel, my mom read to me, and she had sort of a canvas-bound hardback edition from when it was first published, which was in 1951. I think it was hers when she was a child and it's set in 1915, in New York City on the Lower East Side, and it's a Jewish family with five daughters and she read it to me, and then I remember that one as an early book that I was sort of compelled to read for myself, you know, sort of slowly working my way through and I think it was one of the first books where I understood the concept of like the world of a book, you know, and how it can sort of encompass and envelop you. This is a different historical period and these little girls who are sort of my age, but living very different existences, and there's a whole series of those books, but I read all kinds of stuff. I read, you know, children's classics, I read crappy series about horses. I was a horseback rider in my 20s, you know, and so like all the 50 Saddle Club books or whatever. I started reading any books for adults pretty young, like when I was 9 or 10 maybe. I can't remember the first one was I think it might have been James Harriet actually, All Creatures Great and Small. Kind of Yeah, around nine and so then after that, I would sort of also just read anything like, I think that sort of innocence of just picking up a book and being like I'll read this is impossible to recapture now, but I remember in seventh grade, so when I was 12, doing book reports, kind of back to back book reports on Dr. Zhivago, and then like a Tom Clancy book. My teacher was like Sure kid, you knock yourself out. Try anything.

Jack Wrighton 5:42
That's funny, because we have a regular customer who comes in and he sort of gives us book reviews almost weekly on books he's reading and he's trying to read classic a month at the moment, and his most recent one was Dr. Zhivago and I think he said he was like, Oh, it's great. But it's like, it's quite dense. So I love the idea of 12-year-old you being like, right, let's get into this.

Maggie Shipstead 6:06
This makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. I mean, I also was unbothered by not really getting it, like, I would read through parts, I didn't really understand that just kind of persist and, you know, I was one of those people who learned a lot of words from context and so to this day, you know, occasionally I'll say a word out loud and be like, Wait, I've never, I've never heard this word. I've only read it. I don't know how to pronounce.

Jack Wrighton 6:29
Yeah, it's interesting, because you say you, you sort of wouldn't be able to recapture that and I think it's something actually that freedom of just kind of picking up a book and seeing how you go and I think as adults, we can really limit ourselves in the sense of yeah, we have this idea that I have to understand everything on every page, if I'm kind of not getting what's going on, or what even the language is doing. You know, whatever, is, oh, that's a bad thing. But actually, I don't know, I will perfectly admit, as someone who reads a fair amount, then regularly, I'm reading stuff and I'm thinking, Wait, do it, do I understand what's happening here? Like for a moment, but it's not, it doesn't really impact the overall enjoyment of the book and I think it's good to have that childlike curiosity when it comes to reading.

Maggie Shipstead 7:13
Yeah, and it sinks in one way or another, you know, you can understand something partially, and that's still understanding, like, it still matters and it's part of what like, builds in your consciousness. I mean, I think sometimes the only times I can think of when I've been able to just like, randomly pull a book off the shelf and read it, too, is when I've been like at an Airbnb or something and don't have anything to read, you know, like my Library app on my phone or whatever, but just be like, what's this? And it's just some random book from the 70s. And it might be great. It might be terrible, or both, and that's fine and yeah, I feel conscious of it too. Like, especially, you know, spending a year talking about Great Circle, and everyone's always like, what are you reading? And there's this underlying anxiety sometimes about like, am I reading cool enough stuff? You know, like I say, yeah, it doesn't seem high-brow. Like, what if I'm reading and just this like mystery, because I want to turn off my brain and so it's funny. I mean, some authors have truly cool piles of books on their nightstand and I usually don't.

Jack Wrighton 8:19
No, you certainly don't have to worry about that here, because we're, yeah, we're super like, I think also, when you work in a bookshop, you don't like sort of put books into a hierarchy. You're just like, oh, like, what are you reading? And we've had, you know, people sort of shamefully go, oh, actually, as a kid, I didn't read books, I hated books and I watched a lot of TV and we're like, that's fine, tell us about that. So yeah, we're not gonna be like, Oh, you're reading that book are you? Well, that's not cool.

Maggie Shipstead 8:45
I guess I'll sell you that one.

Jack Wrighton 8:47
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We would be bad booksellers if we did that and that's another thing as well as I think people do sort of weirdly become conscious of, you know, how am I reading the right things, and it is just about kind of what you fancy at the time and those books where you can sort of not switch off that you can just enjoy the story. They're great. Like, we need more of those in, you know, this kind of very mad world that we live in, like something where you can just be like, great, let's just get into the story and enjoy it. Very, yeah, very important and so Okay, so you're, you're reading very, veridly when you were younger and did that with that say, did that maintain like into your teens? Because we tend to find there's, you know, different people. There's a different reaction in sort of teenage years.

Maggie Shipstead 9:39
Yeah, I think it did. I really kept reading a lot, you know, like, by night with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep. I don't know how teenagers function. In retrospect, I had no sleep. I was up so late school started at 7:45 and was half an hour away. Like, I don't know how I did it, but you I didn't, you know, I just loved my English classes in high school and had assigned reading, but it didn't sort of seem to take over my reading life the way once I went to university, that was kind of a different story and I feel like that's when things became more complicated, you know, and sort of purposefully reading more critically and having more assigned reading than I could possibly do and so just edged out, you know, most of my reading for pleasure and that's taken a long time, especially then, you know, I did, I graduated from Harvard, and I had one year, and then I went to the Iowa writers workshop, and so started doing my MFA in fiction and so then that introduced another layer of sort of critical reading, where suddenly you're reading for craft, and thinking about, you know, fiction in a in a really different way and so that changed the way I read as well and it's been a bit of a rebuilding process with my reading life over the years, but I have to say, COVID was kind of great for it. I read more books in 2020 then I had in years, you know, and just kind of like, Oh, I'll take this, I'll take that. Chow down, read a book every two days was great. I mean, it wasn't great. But that part of it was great.

Jack Wrighton 11:18
Yeah, we've had others say that as well, in terms of like, you know, focusing on reading or even writing as well, because, of course, it's quite a, for some, it's quite a lonely thing, you know, you're in a room on your own kind of writing, and it kind of helped the focus of, there's no FOMO when everyone else is also at home, you know, there's no, you know, you can just sort of knuckle down and, and get on with it. And in terms of because you've you've mentioned you did that, and I think we have listeners from all over but I think predominantly, a lot of our listeners are from the UK, because am I right in saying that the Ohio MFA is quite a well, like a well known one in terms of because that's a big thing in the US, isn't it? The MFA, is it for people who are into writing and things?

Maggie Shipstead 12:05
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you don't, it's funny that, especially in the early 2000s, there was this big public debate about, you know, getting an MFA versus living life and the two are definitely not mutually exclusive and I would never say a writer has to get an MFA like it is I usually tell people if it's not too disruptive to your life, and you can get into a funded programme, like a programme that pays you, then it's worth going and that's how it was, for me, you know, I was, I didn't really know I wanted to be a writer, like I, I finished college and I was like, I don't know what to do and so it sort of occurred to me to apply to Iowa, and I didn't think I would get in and I thought I'd sort of do my homework and apply to other programmes the following year and so then I got in, and suddenly, I had two years, where I was being told where to be and what to do and I was funded and so for me, it was great. I had done very little fiction writing before I got there, just some in college, and then it really accelerated my learning curve was really useful and I can't, you know, it's true. You can't teach someone to write good fiction, but you can certainly help. You know, and that's what I think good MFA is do and it's true, there's a real proliferation of them in the US and it's not a problem, you know, if they're churning out hundreds, at least, you know, of graduates a year and, you know, plenty of programmes no one ever publishes a book or, you know, other places people publish books, but can't get teaching jobs, and then do other things anyway and so it's, it's part of a, you know, system that still, everything's still very difficult, like, you know, in terms of publishing or succeeding as an author, but it can be sort of a magical little bubble for two years.

Jack Wrighton 13:59
Absolutely and it's interesting that you said, so you left uni, you sort of Oh, like, you know, you weren't, you know, because, you know, some people we speak to like, Yes, I wrote my first story when I was three, and I knew I immediately wanted to be a writer, and that's great. But you know, that's not the case for everyone. So sort of growing up as a kid, you weren't sort of necessarily thinking or, like, this is what I want to do. You would just...

Maggie Shipstead 14:23
yeah, I had all these dorky enthusiasms as a kid, you know, I'd get really into one thing, and then another, I'd be like, now I'm into submarines, or like now I'm into paleoanthropology and I would go down these rabbit holes, and my mom was always kind of like, you know, maybe you should be a writer and I was like, ooh boring no, and I think, you know, at Harvard, I took a couple creative writing classes kind of on a whim, and I wrote a collection of short stories as a thesis and it started to be like, Hmm, you know, interesting. This seems to be something I can do relatively well, but I'm still terrible because I'm 19. But I think it worked to my advantage at Iowa. Because I got there. I mean, not having this fixed dream of being a writer, a novelist, I got there and I was sort of like, I don't think I'm very good. I don't know if this is feasible as a career, I just need something to do and that was a really low-pressure way to come into a pretty high-pressure, what can be a pretty high-pressure environment and I think, for people who had had this lifelong vision of themselves winning a Nobel Prize, that's, really hard. For me, it was just a process of exploration and it did change. You know, I got more serious about it by the end of the first year and by the end of the second year, I was like, wow, you know, maybe I can be a writer and of course, now it's very important to me, it's an integral part of my identity. But yes, I think it was an advantage not to be fixed on that idea.

Jack Wrighton 15:55
Yes, and not to have the huge pressure of being like, I've been rehearsing my Nobel Prize speech since I was 5 and yeah, if I don't get this yeah, no, exactly. That's a very good point, actually, that that approach can maybe be more conducive to kind of creativity, because you're not sort of like putting a lot of pressure on yourself there. So you enjoyed reading, it sounds like in terms of a family environment, like a lot of reading when you were younger and of course, today now you are Maggie Shipstead the writer and so in terms of your reading today, what does that look like? Do you have much time for reading? And you know, if you do, what are some of the books you've read recently that sort of stood out for you?

Maggie Shipstead 16:40
Yeah, I do. I read everyday, I'm sure. My boyfriend and I live together. And we both you know, read at night in bed before we go to sleep, which is nice and my parents always did that, which I think was a nice behaviour to model too, just like, that's a way to unwind. I think I mentioned my email. I just did a 220-mile hike in northern Sweden by myself.

Jack Wrighton 17:03
Completely by yourself? Oh, wow.

Maggie Shipstead 17:07
It was meant to be 270 miles, but my ankles were falling apart and so I got off the trail for four days and skipped 50 miles and got back on and finished. So that's hiking for the whole thing was 23 days, I was hiking for 19 days and sleeping in this little tiny one-person tent and it was below freezing at night and so I all I had to do you know is 6pm I bake camp usually, sometimes later, eat my little dehydrated food bag, and then I have some hours. you know, before I could really feasibly go to sleep and so I'd get my tent with my phone and I had to be sort of conscious of the battery like at a power pack, but I just read and read and read on my phone. So read a bunch of books during that time trying to track them all down. The last one I read on the trail was Persuasion, which I had never read, I think was the only Austen novel I hadn't read and I loved it of course and randomly I read The Martian by Andy Weir. I had downloaded it, I was just curious and it was like 300 pages of troubleshooting and I was like I'm not really sure. What else... I read, I don't know if it's big over there, Jeanette McCurdy's memoir called I'm Glad My Mom Died. She was kind of a child star.

Jack Wrighton 18:27
Yeah, so that's been interesting here because it's not I don't think at the moment it's officially published in the in the UK, but through things like TikTok and you know, these social media movements, which are having a great effect on book sales. We've had a couple of people order it in the shop, we can get it. It's just it's the American edition. Yes and that does sound like a fascinating read in you know, obviously, like, in a difficult way because obviously that's her life and it wasn't it was not easy, but yeah, there's been a lot of talk about that one.

Maggie Shipstead 19:05
Yeah, it's not harrowing, because she's very funny and I think she really yourself I don't think she had a co writer ghostwriter and yeah, it's just it's kind of you know, old story like abusive stage mother and, and child star, but I really it was pretty interesting and yeah, like that. I reread Wild because I was hiking.

Jack Wrighton 19:26
Absolutely. I'm interested in Persuasion, you must forgive me I haven't I haven't read Seating Arrangements. But from what I have...

Maggie Shipstead 19:37
How dare you!

Jack Wrighton 19:37
I know it's shocking isn't it actually, you end the call immediately you just disappear and I'm like Oh, no.

Maggie Shipstead 19:43
Do your homework guy!

Jack Wrighton 19:45
Yeah, terrible. But am I right in saying it because it sounds like you said persuasion was like sort of the last Austin you haven't read. It sounds like you really love Austin and Seating Arrangements is a kind of like comedy of manners. From reading the blurb because when I read Great Circle, which we'll talk about later, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I obviously is something you always do you kind of look at the authors of the works and you start lining up books to read. So was Austin like quite a big, like influence on you as a writer? Like, do you enjoy that kind of comedy of people saying one thing, but kind of, you can tell something else is kind of being said between the lines?

Maggie Shipstead 20:29
Absolutely, I mean, I was very young when I wrote Seating Arrangements. I was 25 when I wrote it, I was 28 when it was published. So, to degree, I didn't really know what I was doing. I mean, I really didn't know what I was doing and so in some ways, it's hard to identify influences. Like, I think they're really because it's about this waspy family having a wedding on sort of resort island. It's like a fictionalised Nantucket and I was living on Nantucket when I wrote it. Through winter. It's like an abandoned freezing island. But yeah, I mean, it had, I do think Austin was an influence because it's a social satire in its way, I'm critical of the characters. But I think I also, you know, to me, it wouldn't be interesting to write critically about characters but not extend some empathy to them, which I think is true of her as well. You know, there's always a tenderness even for kind of the most loathsome characters that would be unendurable in life. So yeah, I mean, she's in there. Absolutely. I also at the time, you know, I was reading a lot of kind of John Updike, a John Cheever, which I was thinking about a minute ago when we were talking about MFA. Another thing that's hard about coming in with this dream of being a writer is I think, your dream is tethered to sort of like previous generations of writers and how things worked, then like MFA students tend to be a little like, not super interested in contemporary fiction, and they're like, I want a career like that and it's like, well, you can't have that doesn't exist anymore and I was still sort of innocent after achiever updates sort of uncritically you know, I was like, this doesn't seem misogynist at all and so I could also sort of, you know, just incorporated into my sort of the way I thought about fiction or about writing about these people and, you know, I've reread that book in the past couple years, I had to, for some reason, and, you know, to me, it seems like the work of a young person, which it is, you know, and I would never write it in quite the same way. Like, I don't regret what it is, you know, and I'm not gonna like, I don't know, it is what it is. But it's an odd experience to be like, Oh, this was me 14 years ago, trying to make sense of a world and this sort of corner of American society. So it's interesting.

Jack Wrighton 23:01
But yeah, began had you had sort of short stories published before that, or was the...?

Maggie Shipstead 23:08
Just a couple. So when I was at Iowa, I was 23 and 24 and I, you know, was writing short stories, I met my agent, my second year, she was coming to the workshop to like, look for people and I would never have the guts to go meet with her. But the programme administrator sent me to pick her up at the airport and so she like, became my agent. So I always say, it's like marrying the first person you go on a date with because here we are like, she was on maternity leave, had just come off maternity leave then and now that kids like, you know, 17 Soo she took a couple of my short stories and sent them out. So I think while I was writing Seating Arrangements or the first draft was when I published my first just couple stories, you know, in tiny journals and then the year after I wrote it on when I was on Nantucket, I had a fellowship to Stanford, which was a two year writing fellowship was kind of like your back and workshop. In for two years, when I came out of there Seating Arrangements was published, but I wrote a bunch of stories at Stanford, that also kind of ended up in little journals and then after that, I wrote relatively few stories, like my story collection came out in the spring and the most recent story in that I wrote in 2017, and the oldest one I wrote, actually at Iowa, so it's this whole span, but kind of my most productive short story period. was those two years at Stanford, which was 2010, 2012.

Jack Wrighton 24:48
Okay, yes, yeah. Yes. When you were saying earlier about, you know, how the writing industry has changed and people kind of comparing themselves to, I feel like there was a time where you could sort of have one short story published and that would sustain you for like half a year like as in, we're talking 50 years ago, it feels like, yeah, it's like, those days are gone unfortunately.

Maggie Shipstead 25:09
It's so funny because I was obsessed with getting a story in The New Yorker, you know, and a lot of my friends published stories in the New Yorker, and I came really close with my first story, we sent out from Iowa, which is in my collections called the Cowboy Tango and this editor who is not at the New Yorker anymore, kind of she was like, Yeah, we love this. It's a little long, I'm going to like, kind of, you could semi-consider it accepted. We're going to try and trim it down and then she decided they couldn't trim it down and so they didn't take it and I was like, Oh, that's okay. Like, I'll just we'll take the next time. They did not they never did. But now you know, it's funny. I mean, that's part of what's another thing that's challenging about being an MFA student is everything seems like the most gigantic important deal like if your classmate has a story and like the East Nowhere Review, you're like, Oh, they're a famous writer now and like, what am I am nothing and, you know, in retrospect, it's just like, well, is everyone so worried about like, even getting a star in The New Yorker, like sad this day, kind of no one necessarily notices like, it doesn't even matter. I mean, it's great. Congratulations to those writers, it is very hard to do. And they publish a lot of wonderful stuff. But it's all such a, it's really a marathon, not a sprint, which is really hard to internalise when you're a student.

Jack Wrighton 26:29
Yes, that kind of, you know, you have that belief that, yeah, every kind of decision, rejection or whatever sets the path forever and that's yeah, again, that's a very stressful situation, to kind of put yourself in mentally.

Maggie Shipstead 26:47
It's so bad.

Jack Wrighton 26:48
And yeah, so sorry, I completely skipped over as well, this huge trek you did in Sweden and one thing I did want to ask is, I've noticed with, certainly in Great Circle, there's a lot of kind of big, or how I saw them in my head. I mean, I've never been to Alaska, so I don't know. But I imagine kind of big open spaces, you know, really isolated. Is that, do you have like, a connection to those sort of places?

Maggie Shipstead 27:22
Yeah, I love a giant wasteland. I always have I've drawn to those landscapes, I mean, great circle. So started writing grade circle in September 2014 and right before it started in June 2014, I went to the Arctic, for the first time, I went on a trip for artists to Svallbard, which a lot of people know, but you know, Northern Norway, part of Norway, but like north of the Scandinavian Peninsula and it was amazing. It was just this sort of thrilling look at like, Oh, my, this part of the world exists. Like it's going about its business sort of without, you know, humans play a tiny role there I mean, we play a much larger destructive role from afar, but in the actual, like, the living of the place, it's very wild and so when I started writing Great Circle, I knew very few things. I can't plot out a book in advance. So I knew that Marian would disappear while trying to fly around the world, north-south and I knew she would transport war plans in World War Two, but I didn't know if she would do it in the US or the UK and both were historically possible and so I was like, Well, you know, again, I wouldn't say writers have to go to all the places they write about, it's possible to do enough research, but it was important to me to see the polar regions and so I started trying to get there and one thing that really ended up sort of serendipitously happening and then helping me immensely, was I started writing for travel magazines in 2015 and my first few assignments sort of fell into my lap, and one was I just knew someone who became an editor at one magazine, and she offered me a story on Hawaii, like, yes, you know, and the other was because my second book was about ballet. I wrote a profile of a ballet dancer for Conde Nast traveller and then I started pitching them stories. And so the first assignment I got through and travelled on was to the New Zealand sub-Antarctic, and on that trip, I met someone who's an expedition leader and we were where I wrote in Modern Love in the New York Times about this, people can look it up if they want, but then he took me to Antarctica after that, and to the Ross Sea region, which is where Marian disappears and almost no one goes there. It's really hard to get to and it was this amazing, transformative experience. But then, you know, I would pitch stories that were sort of places I wanted to go or places that spoke to me, which tend to be these sort of, you know, wildernesses and so over time, while I was writing, I went, I've now been to the Arctic. I don't know, six or seven times, I've been to Antarctica twice.

Jack Wrighton 30:19
Oh wow. That feels in terms of like, you know, average statistically, humanity-wise, that puts you up there in terms of percentage of people who are like, well acquainted with the polls, like...

Maggie Shipstead 30:32
Yeah and it's sort of a self-fulfilling thing. Because once you've done a couple of then editors will be like, well, we need someone to, like take this cruise to Greenland and like Shipstead likes that and knows what she's talking about and it is helpful to have sort of an integral sort of knowledge of these places and it was, it was very helpful for the book, both in terms of getting a sense of the place and also, you know, I encounter people who are truly competent in these remote places and so at home, they're so driven to be there and so they, you know, one way or another sort of inform Marion's character as well.

Jack Wrighton 31:16
Yeah, just because reading it, you know, it felt like, you know, the descriptions, it was, you know, one of the many wonderful aspects of the book with these kinds of descriptions, or the feeling captured of, of being in these places, because for me, yeah, Antarctica gives me a sort of, you know, it's both kind of exciting, beautiful, but also kind of gives me an almost like a pinching feeling in my stomach of like, you know, because it's so, you know, alien is kind of the wrong word, but also, at the same time, it sort of fits into in terms of, you know, my life in a kind of a small English town, you know, suddenly somewhere that's just completely, humans don't live there, like full time.

Maggie Shipstead 31:59
It's very alien and when you're there, it's inescapable that it wants to kill you. Like it's inhospitable, you know, like when, in the Ross Sea, I was sort of like a staff member on the ship, because my boyfriend was the expedition leader. So it was like tending bar and helping people on and off the zodiacs and stuff and you could see this reaction play out a lot, because that kind of travel is so expensive, and requires a lot of time. So a lot of people who do it have a lot of money and are sort of used to being in charge of things and you could see, something would sort of go a teeny tiny little bit wrong, which they'd get spooked in some way or another, and they'd get scared, and then they'd get angry and then they'd be like, you know, lash out at whatever staff member is nearby and was very human response, just trying to seek a little bit of control in this place where you're just surrounded by like, glossy black, freezing water, and it's so especially that trip or sort of near the end of the season and I remember we made a landing near McMurdo Station went to this historic like an Explorer's hut and I was standing outside the hut for few hours, like making sure the right number of people, there's only a certain number of people allowed inside at times as counting people. It was the coldest I've ever been, it was just so cold, and we got on the little Zodiac raft to go back to the ship at the end of this landing and the ocean was freezing around us like not going to lock it in place. Because see the ice forming and all this smoke rising and the fuel line for the Zodiac froze and so maybe for 20 minutes, we're just sitting there, freezing our butts off while my boyfriend tried to fix the motor, you know, and I remember just being like, curled up and then I ran back to my, when we got back to the ship, I ran to my bunk and got under the covers and just tried to warm up and it was like, this is summer here and so really, you feel very vulnerable and it's, I mean, that's part of the beauty of being there and also part of the challenge.

Jack Wrighton 34:07
Yes, yeah and that I suppose as well, you know, what feels so I think particularly from anyone probably growing up in the UK, I think it's a bit different in the US, where you still have kind of very large, either somewhat somewhere where you can be X amount of 10s or even hundreds of miles away from like, the nearest kind of like town or even personally but whereas in the UK, you're never more than 20 minutes away from like a supermarket like it's not like that, you know, somewhere like Antarctica, you know, it's we're used to this world where kind of everyone knows where you are, but that feels like somewhere where you can sort of truly vanish like the you know, nature would just as it were kind of could just swallow you up and you know, obviously that kind of danger of Antarctica is featured in the book as well of the of the potential dangers that can have. So yeah, it's really interesting to know that you have like a personal, you know, that place and that does come across in the book. But of course, you never know whether it's good research or like all personal experience there's no way of knowing.

Maggie Shipstead 35:22
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was always the challenge in planning Marion's route because in that era 1950, there were no permanent settlements on Antarctica. So it became sort of like, how do I finagle this so she could refuel twice, and I learned line trip with an expedition in East Antarctica, that was real and then there would have been feel cached on the rasa shell. So it kind of had to make it go work. But it was, you know, a really big if and the other thing I did was, you know, I've sort of been twice to the Ross Sea, and then also the Antarctic Peninsula from South America, but you're just sort of on the fringe and so I was like, Well, you know, I was very curious about the interior, which is really hard to get to as a tourist it's prohibitively expensive. Like maybe, you know, if that assignment had landed in my lap, great, but what I ended up doing was I pitched a story to Outside Magazine about these pilots in our national guard that do our polar Airlift. So in the northern winter, they're in Antarctica, and in the northern summer, they train in Greenland. So I rode in the back of a cargo plane from upstate New York to Greenland, and then went with them while they landed on the Greenland ice sheet and so I got to get out of this plane and be standing on this, you know, circle of white, just snow and now I'm standing on thousands of feet of ice on or there's a dome of sky and I was like, it's, you know, indistinguishable from what Antarctica would look like in the interior and it was, you know, in the book, it's maybe two sentences sort of conveying that description. But to me, just the feeling of it ended up being something really important to have sort of felt and to know, and very strange.

Jack Wrighton 36:58
Yeah, I can't imagine I can't imagine.

Maggie Shipstead 37:03
I know, I couldn't imagine either and even having been to Antarctica, before that, I was like, this is just the scale of it, you know, grade circle, I think, as a book was very concerned with scale and that was a sort of important illustration of it.

Jack Wrighton 37:16
Yeah, it's interesting. It's, it's also, uh, you know, it makes you think, is it almost harder? Because you've been there to describe it, because you and if you haven't, you know, you could imagine someone might just be a bit like, oh, I'll just say, Oh, it's really cold and, you know, they're fine because they're like, I haven't been so I don't know, where it's actually because you've been, you know, that experience of just being anywhere where it kind of like, there's a kind of the subconscious, not understanding of it, but kind of like experience of it, then...

Maggie Shipstead 37:47
I don't know if you can hear that but that's a cruise ship. I'm in San Diego. It's leaving port, I guess.

Jack Wrighton 37:55
I actually thought it sounded like someone like playing a key on a piano. But, yes, yeah because you've had that actual sort of visceral, physical experience of it, that that, you know, you're more attached to the description, then.

Maggie Shipstead 38:11
100% Yeah, I mean, then the temptation is to just like, over-describe and be like, I need to tell you guys everything I, you know, learned about Antarctica or saw there and you can't do that either. That was a big part of the process with this book, because the first draft took me three years and three months, and it was 980 manuscript pages. So this, I mean, the conversion from manuscript to typeset, you know, would shrink it anyway. But I cut more than 200 pages, sort of in the process of editing and a lot of that there weren't very many big chunks I could cut it was really more just relentlessly going through it over and over again, and cutting sentences and words and paragraphs, which when you have 1000 pages to work with, it really adds up. But a lot of that was tightening up there was a lot of... there was some description that that had to go by the wayside and my editor would leave these little notes in the margins that were like enough!

Jack Wrighton 39:09
How much description of ice can we have in one?

Yeah, no more snow!

Oh, yeah. So that's, that's interesting. Obviously, that's a common thing, you know, speaking to a lot of writers on here is that talk of sort of the initial thing being bigger than what arrives kind of in the reader's hands, because I think certainly in the UK edition, I think it's around sort of 600 pages at last check. So, yeah, it's obvious that a fair amount went but that seems like such a common thing.

Maggie Shipstead 39:40
Yeah, I think that's a purposeful I mean, the American edition I think is the same pagination and it's a... they're purposeful, and making it seem as short as it could possibly seem, it does not seem short, but there's some of the translations are like, they look like phonebooks they're huge because they're just like, you know, the spines are like four inches thick and I don't know if it's because you know, different languages are efficient in different ways or if they're, if there's sort of a cachet without the book being enormous or something, but it's really funny, I have a shelf in my house from sort of accumulating the translations and the English ones look like, you know, half as long as you know, Danish or Dutch.

Jack Wrighton 40:25
That is interesting about the differences. Yeah, I always find translation fascinating, because I feel like... I have a few friends who sort of do translation and it's cool. It's much more creative than I think people realise. Because, you know, if you there seems to be a thing in the UK, at the moment, where we're getting a lot of them translated Japanese fiction, there seems to be a real kind of desire for it and also kind of, you know, publishers putting it out there because of the success of previous books and I spent some time in Japan and I did a bit of learning in Japanese, I wasn't very good, but I did some learning and even that learning enough was to know that the language is so different. I can't imagine for a translator sitting down and going, right. You know, languages will have words for things that take almost a whole paragraph to express in English, and vice versa. So I love that idea of your shelf of translate. It must be really lovely, I think to see it. Even if you can't comprehend to see it kind of written in a different and go, like my story is in there. But in a form that's not always accessible to us. I don't know, there's something exciting.

Maggie Shipstead 41:33
Yeah, it is always really fun and it's fun to see different covers and I haven't done it with Great Circle, but with Seating Arrangements. I ran like the jacket blurbs through Google Translate just to see what different countries were emphasising and, like, you know, the Italian version would be like sumptuous feasts of lobster and wine and then the French version was like dirty sex with old men. You guys know your markets, I'll give you that.

Jack Wrighton 42:05
Yeah, that is interesting. Yes. It's almost a bit like I've noticed on social media, a real interesting comparing US and UK book covers and how they differ and in that there's a sense of kind of, they must be thinking about the market as it were, and kind of what will appeal to different and that's yeah, that's always interesting. I've read like, yeah, I've realised we got waylaid slightly, but that's, that's fine.

You didn't want to talk about Antarctica for 20 minutes?

No we did, we absolutely did. Yeah. So you did that reading in the Yeah. On the, on your phone in the tent during this, sounds like an amazing experience and I imagine quite an emotional one as well. I always feel on these kinds of long. I have friends who are sort of into kind of long, sort of trecks or, or hikes or whatever and I don't know, there's always like great highs, but also like, lower lows.

Maggie Shipstead 43:08
Low lows. Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, I miss it, my body was definitely falling apart, I'd done five day trecks before but, you know, it turns out doing four times that is different and I sort of got through the last four days by just using medical tape on my bear skin of taping my ankles in like, in place like braces on most of them. But yeah, it was, you know, there's such a built in sense of purpose. Like, every day, if you move forward, and you feed yourself and you get in your tent, that's a great day you accomplished everything you can accomplish and I went partly, my mum died in early July and there's such... there's so much that's overwhelming about that kind of loss, but some of it's the communication, you know, just so much, you know, condolences and people checking in and so really wanted the peace and quiet and just not being reachable. Like my boyfriend could text me on my GPS device and that was it, and just being responsible for myself and it just really gave me space for my grief, and also, but I wasn't, you know, I wasn't thinking about her all the time. I wasn't thinking about anything, like mostly you're just like, I'm gonna step on that rock. I'm gonna step on this rock. Now I'm going to step on this rock, just for hours and hours every day and when am I going to stop and what am I going to eat? And that's kind of the bulk of your thinking. But I think that blankness is sort of healing in itself and like I said, I reread Wild, that was the first book I read in my tent, and Cheryl Strange says that too. She was like I was for once I was like, not crying. I was just thinking, I was not thinking I was just walking and that was the experience. So yeah, it was exactly the right thing at the right time and it was really, really hard but really satisfying and I really kind of miss it now that I'm back.

Jack Wrighton 45:03
It sounds like, almost like a form of through kind of your environment and what you're doing almost like a sort of a mindfulness thing, you know, because it's kind of clearing the mind. But as opposed to, because I'm certainly not someone that, you know, if he told me to sit down and not think about anything, like, my brain just unfortunately is not wired like that. But actually something like that, because you're so focused on, you know, as you said, moving and feeding yourself, that actually that kind of maybe allows that space that is required, because I've heard other people describe it as a kind of almost like a emotional kind of claustrophobia of you know, because you've got your own feelings, but also everyone's else's feelings kind of being directed like at you. So it sounds like yeah, it sounds like a... and is that anything, if you don't mind me asking that you're, you're writing about this isn't related to any sort of like...

Maggie Shipstead 45:56
No, it wasn't an assignment. I mean, I will probably write about it, I guess, in some form. But it was also like, so often when I travel, it's it's on assignment and I have to be sort of consolidating it into a piece. But yeah, and not for a book either. I am working on a new book, but it's separate from that. So...

Jack Wrighton 46:18
Yes, yeah. Don't worry, I won't I won't do too much delve into... Because it must be a hard question when you're writing something when people are like,

Maggie Shipstead 46:26
I mean, everyone asked, I'll tell you my three-sentence thing about it. I mean, it took me a while to get going on something new and I was like, no research, no luck, no more Great Circle research and so it's about a family in LA. I'm starting it in 2019 and I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to deal with the pandemic, I think I might skip the first part of it. So I don't have to write about toilet paper hoarding or whatever. But it's about, there's sort of a Hollywood family. So there's a bit of a connection to the Hadley part of Great Circle, but I always I sort of start books often with questions and so Great Circle was like, What's the difference between disappearance and death? Like, why do we process those two things so differently? This book is what happens when two people who fundamentally don't like each other, get married and stay married for decades?

Jack Wrighton 47:16
Oh, wow.

Maggie Shipstead 47:18
And so it's, of course, kind of my inclination is sprawl and so it's already sort of sprawling, and now it's about like, lithium mining and so that's one thing and all these things, but yeah, I'm enjoying writing it now.

Jack Wrighton 47:35
That sounds good. Yeah. No research and then lithium mining.

Maggie Shipstead 47:40
I hadn't even thought about that. But...

Jack Wrighton 47:43
Yeah, suddenly go to the library looking at what do you have on lithium mining? So yeah, so we discussed some of the, you know, you've talked about Wild, which you have something like that is obviously like, you know, a kind of a classic book for you in general. But, you know, for anyone who's sort of going on a journey like that.

Maggie Shipstead 48:06
I know, I felt like a little bit of a cliche reading it. I was like, that's fine.

Jack Wrighton 48:09
It's good to be a cliche sometimes. You can't avoid cliche... Yeah, no, it's being a cliche can be very comforting sometimes, actually. So yeah and so we talked about your last books now a big question which I always feel is is such a big one to ask one is when we ask is a book that changed your life?

Maggie Shipstead 48:27
Yeah. Oh, when you email me about that I was sitting and looking at my bookshelves and I was like, I don't know, you know, and what caught my eye was this big in this now connects back to Antarctica, like I managed to do with everything. It's my go to is this book by Sara Wheeler, a nonfiction book, like sort of hybrid travel memoir and history about Antarctica called Terra Incognita and it came out in 1999. I probably read it that year when I was 16 and I'd never really thought about Antarctica and I think that book, in some ways, was the root of my fascination with it and she had applied through an American programme with our National Science Foundation, they had an artist and writers programme that would send people to McMurdo Station or permanent station on the Red Sea for a period of months like through the Antarctic summer and then I think she might have wintered over I can't remember very few people do that, but it was Yeah, ooh dark and it was just captivating. I was so jealous and actually applied to that programme when I was starting Great Circle, because it's always loomed large in my mind, and I was summarily rejected. But yeah, I think that book and right around the same time I read a book called Maiden Voyage which was older and as by a woman who when she was maybe 19, or 20, she was I guess the late 80s or early 90s. She was kind getting into trouble and her mom had died, I think and her dad said, Well, you can either go to college or you can sail alone around the world. And she was like, Fine, I'll sail alone around the world. Her name is Tanya Aebi and so she did and the book is a memoir about it and so kind of those two books, which I think I read around the same time, sort of got in my brain, like with women travelling alone, you know, and then doing these adventurous things much more adventurous than I will ever do the sailing in particular. But yeah, I think those coupled with some travelling I did with my mom, as a teenager, kind of instilled in me this idea of like, well, you can just go like if you want to go badly enough, like you can find a way to do it one way or another and that I think I'm realising kind of more as I get older, like really did determine, you know, the course of my life to a degree and I think, yeah, I would say those books stick out to me more than any fiction really.

Jack Wrighton 51:09
As something. yeah, as something that sort of planted a seed by the sound of it, particularly the Terra Incognita one like that sounds like that really, something stuck in there and hasn't let go.

Maggie Shipstead 51:23
Yeah, I find that with the polar regions, because, you know, with the other travel I've done in those places, often on ships, you know, people usually travel in couples, you know, not always, of course, there are plenty of solo travellers. But usually, it's couples and so often, one of them has this deep intuitive pull to the polls, and the other kind of doesn't care but as being a good sport, and that's so often the way it is, I think people either just like, it gets under your skin, and you're obsessed, you're drawn back again and again, or you're sort of like, I don't know, it's fine, it's cold and that seems to really often divide within a couple and not according to any consistent gender lines, just one or the other.

Jack Wrighton 52:09
That's interesting then because a bit like all this, you were saying earlier with them, people either going into writing with the whole, like, old, no, this is my life. And you know, if x, y doesn't happen, then that's terrible and people who just sort of develop it over time, I wonder if there are for some people who are like, drawn to it, whether there's, you know, higher emotions. and then the people who kind of discover it, like, oh, wow, this is like, it's transformative in a different way. Because they haven't had that like...

Maggie Shipstead 52:42
Yeah, that's really astute and I think that's really true. That actually happened. When I go on a cruise for a magazine, I can always bring a guest, which is the most amazing thing in the world, because it's sort of this gift to my friends and so I brought a friend to on a cruise to Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic, and he has like very much a city mouse and had never thought about that part of the world and yeah, blew his mind and then when I went to the Antarctic Peninsula, I took my mom with me, and it was just a game changer for her. I've never seen anyone just so like joyously embrace the place and she found this affinity with penguins. She didn't know she had to the point where when she came back, she changed the licence plate on her car to be Gentoo, which is a species of penguin, oh, my god, Gentoo penguins, and she was just like, I am a gentoo penguin and I was like ok, well they're pretty silly but sure.

Jack Wrighton 53:35
Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah, people sort of, you know, it's something that to kind of be fully considered has to be experienced. So you know, people can go their whole lives kind of being like, oh, you know, why would I go there and then go and kind of suddenly, it kind of sticks with them.

Maggie Shipstead 53:57
And I mean, the other aspect of what you're saying is true, as well. I think some people go in with this, like, this is my, you know, I've been wanting to go my whole life and see this hut, you know that Ernest Shackleton stayed in, and sometimes those high expectations can make the experience very difficult because if things aren't perfect, they're like it's there's this sort of sense of crumbling. Not for everyone. I mean, I've seen people also fulfil lifelong dreams there and be with nothing but happiness. But for some people, it's just like, it doesn't match you know, like how you hear about people going to Paris with this vision of what it's like and then falling into depression because it's actually like a modern city.

Jack Wrighton 54:36
it's not you know, yeah, it's not the great sort of romance, but it is. Yeah, which is again, like so interesting how we experience things through other people's kind of ideas or the scrubbed-up versions and then they're not, you know, they're not quite how they seem and you know, certainly coming from the UK like, again, I would have never really thought about kind of wide open spaces very often and then are in into seeing Central Australia and just kind of being like, oh my god, what?! And that's interesting as well, because obviously in terms of them, you know, the indigenous people who, who live there, you know, live there for tens of thousands of years and yet, you know, plunk me in that and oh, dead in probably less than 24 hours, you know?

Maggie Shipstead 55:25
No, same, yeah.

Jack Wrighton 55:25
And so that's interesting because it is a human landscape. And yet so many like coming to that they would be, you know, the initial reaction would almost be like a kind of low-level sort of terror almost. It's so alien again.

Maggie Shipstead 55:46
Yeah, sublime terror well, and Antarctica, you know, is unique and not being a human landscape. But the Arctic in its, you know, the Inuit survived sustainably, really for thousands of years and, you know, you see it over and over again, like with the rediscovery of, you know, John Franklin's missing ships in the past decade and they were exactly where the Inuit said they would be, but like, nobody, people were like, oh, you know, disregarded this sort of information. For years and then finally, you know, it turns out it's true.

Jack Wrighton 56:17
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's again, like Australia, and, you know, indigenous, kind of land management techniques, suddenly, everyone's like, Oh, actually, what we were doing before was really bad and actually what they were doing, you know, surprise, surprise, the people who, you know, kind of had a, you know, a relationship with the landscape, you know, and one that wasn't based on kind of like, subjugation, you know, have, you know, actually knew, you know, how to look after it and kind of live their, sort of harmoniously. So, obviously, that brings us, you know, we talked about the books that changed your life, and you mentioned Terra Incognita and that link with them with well, with both, both of the polls and so that does, I think, bring us nicely to Great Circle, which, as I said, your most recent book, actually out in the UK is that collection of short stories that, you know, again, our listeners will be able to get from the shop, online or with any of your local sort of indie bookshops as well. But Great Circle is the one I think, you know, sort of most people listening to this would I think, kind of first think of and so for those who are maybe coming across Great Circle for the first time, would you mind sort of, you know, giving a sort of short you know, that like that three line one you gave your short introduction to Great Circle?

Maggie Shipstead 57:43
Absolutely. Yeah, Great Circle is about a female pilot who's fictional, I feel like I should specify, like the Google suggestions for my name, it's all of them are like Maggie Shipsteas said is Marian Graves real and some people will text me they're like, I love the book, I'm off to learn everything I can about Marian Graves. I'm like, Well, you already have. So this fictional female pilot who disappears while trying to fly around the world, north-south and 1950. But it starts with her actually, before her birth, it goes through her childhood learning to fly in Montana in the 20s and she flies in Alaska and the 30. She flies war plans for the air transport auxilary in the UK during World War Two and then it's interwoven with the story of a contemporary modern movie star named Hadley Baxter, who is playing Marian in a biopic about her life and sort of gets drawn into this question of what happened to her and also who she was and how you go about constructing a story about someone, especially someone who is real.

Jack Wrighton 58:49
And there's two things that I definitely, you know, want to discuss is firstly, the fact that yes, we've we've heard this, about people Googling, Marian and kind of, you know, wanting to find out and, you know, that must be I don't know, is that, you know, is there a bit of a kind of, you know, a nice sort of smugness there of like, you know, like people have read this and, and left blinking actually, you know, this is, this is a real person, I want to find out more of like, is that... have you enjoyed that?

Maggie Shipstead 59:21
Well, it's puzzling, in a way. Although I guess it makes sense, because there are lots of books that are just sort of fictionalisations of real people like there's the Paul Mclain book about Beryl Markham, which I thought was honestly a little bit odd just because Beryl Markham had written a classic book about herself. But yeah, I mean, it does. I guess it seems like good evidence that the character feels real, which of course is what you're always trying to do. So it is, it's flattering. It's funny. Yeah. The other one is Marian Graves' obituary. Like, again, you've read it.

Jack Wrighton 1:00:00
You'll be busy with many other things. But one day, maybe you should just write the obituary and you'll get loads of website views, wouldn't you from like other people like looking at, and the other one Hadley is such another. It would be easy to focus on, you know, Marian everything sort of convert, like converges on her Hadley's also and you know, this other sort of brilliant character, you know, where does that because you can describe the sort of the Marian part of the book, and then when you're talking about the other one, you know, what's so wonderful about them is, even though obviously, they're linked, they feel so separate, you know, we've got this kind of, you know, sort of actress living in LA, which feels kind of very, yeah, very contemporary, and very something that people were like, oh, yeah, like, I know what you mean by that. Whereas Marian stories, like all they all this sounds, you know, and how did those two stories come together? Like, how did they merge?

Maggie Shipstead 1:00:57
Well, that was one of the great difficulties of writing the book. So yeah, my initial concept of it, I didn't have Hadley and I think I've been writing for about a month and just one day, I sat down and I wrote a section in Hadley's voice where she's leaving this nightclub with publicly cheating on her co-star boyfriend and getting busted and nothing on the surface that connected it to what I was starting to write about this pilot, or at that point, I was writing about, like the ship launch, you know, and, but it to me, it just felt like the missing piece and I'd written a short story that's in my collection, also kind of in a movie star's voice and I liked the intensity of the voice and I liked being able to play with sort of widely known celebrity gossip. So you start with starting not from zero, but from something people are familiar with and in the case of Hadley, it's sort of like Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson when they were, and people projected so much on them what an impossible burden for these two extremely young people. I think Kristen Stewart was still a teenager and so Hadley kind of became, I mean, I started writing it partly just because I thought it was fun, and would be interesting and it was something I could write with relatively little research and it allowed me to be playful and have more humour and also sort of the to the book. But as the book sort of, developed, it also became this lens on like, the reader has a really intimate look at Marion's life and then Hadley is trying to reconstruct it from 70 years on through the sort of game of telephone, like the logbook is made into a novel which has been made into a movie that Hadley's in, and it's sort of like, so much as lost when someone dies, you know, and as Hadley says, somewhere in the book, it's like, you have to pick a version of the story and commit to that and so, I don't know, some, like when we were trying to shorten the book, when it was still 1000 pages. Of course, one of the ideas was like, what if we just got rid of Hadley and some people really don't like the Hadley parts? Like, I had questions at live events where someone's like, were you glad you included Hadley?

Jack Wrighton 1:03:03
Oh wow.

Maggie Shipstead 1:03:03
And I was like, yeah, I think so. So it tends to be a little bit generational, but not. But to me, you know, I also didn't want to write like this just loaf of solid historical fiction it was it was a different kind of book to me. But Hadley like Marion's part of the book was more or less intact throughout drafting it kind of the first draft and what it is now are not very different, whereas Hadley had to take a couple of runs at and it was partly because of what you're describing, like, how do you connect them in a way that's not to kind of cute and neat, but it's meaningful, and I sort of put in, you know, these concrete connections between them, like, you know, being raised by their uncles and sort of parents who sort of vanished not because I think that's necessarily important, but because Hadley would see it as like, Hadley's looking for what's in this for her like Marian, this sort of like tarot cards to her or something. She's like, What is the universe telling me through this woman and I wanted her to see that from the beginning and then, over the course of the book, I think Hadley becomes ever so slightly less self-absorbed and like, understands that this Marion's life was actually for Marion and not for her and yeah, that was really complicated. It was also something I didn't realise until fairly recently is like it. The book has been auctioned for TV series, whether that means it'll be made into TV series very big if but I talked to the writer who's working on it, and she was like, saying how Hadley's story in some ways is much more difficult to translate to TV, which I hadn't thought of and Hadley's arc is indeed very internal in a way that Marians is very action-oriented and I was like, that's true. You know, you think of it as I thought of it as being visual. But it's kind of not it's really the headspace of this one woman so yeah. But they also are like I also was comfortable with leaving Uh, like, I'm always asked, well, what are you saying about, you know, modern women with Hadley versus Marion, and then I'm like, I'm, we're just sort of putting this out there. It's like a cheese plate and you can do with it where you want.

Jack Wrighton 1:05:10
Yeah, exactly. And I think, yeah, I think there can be an over-emphasis sometimes on like, when, you know, when a writer does something, like, what are they saying about this and I to know, that it doesn't, doesn't always have to be the case. Like some, you know, sometimes it's, you know, part of the story and yeah, oh, that's interesting that there's been a sort of a bit of a, you know, a divide, or, you know, different people have, you know, reacted to the Hadley segments, I think, for me, I really enjoyed it because I think as well, we're very familiar, particularly at the moment of, you know, the kind of the Hollywood biopic of someone and, and what that, and every time that happens, you know, there's always a discussion about like, well, actually, they've completely ignored this part of their lives, or they've scrubbed out anything that kind of would make it difficult to sell to, like different markets, that you know, that they, they clean the person up, or that or they do certain things. So I think, I didn't know that, that seemed such a nice, you know, a nice thing to kind of that we've got, you know, we're experiencing, we're kind of in on Marion's life in a way that, like, other people aren't that kind of joy, as a reader that you get of kind of like, you're in on it, like, you know, what's kind of the situation and then we're sort of seeing heavily trying to, like, sort of find that, you know, for herself when, you know, as you say, like, when someone's you know, either died or disappeared, has, you know, becomes not impossible... well sort of impossible to kind of know, what we know, is the reader. So for me, yeah, like, beautiful and kind of like worked perfectly. But you know, it's interesting, I can see why maybe some people would, you know, love one thing and not, you know, and not the other. But again, that's what makes I don't know, like, an interesting book. If you were pleasing everyone, then you might sort of be like, Oh, okay, like, I don't know...

Maggie Shipstead 1:07:09
That's what I tell myself. Yeah, I mean, also, I think if you're used to reading a tonne of historical fiction, this would be a little frustrating and I didn't when I started writing, I didn't think oh, now I'm writing historical fiction and sort of snuck up on me that that is, in fact, what I wrote. But yeah, and it just, you know, I also made peace fairly early on with it being sort of everything but the kitchen sink book, like the sections in it, that are incomplete histories and have sort of like geological time and I was just like, I'm just gonna go big, you know, and it's a book about too-bigness and I think that's in there in a meta way, too, with Jamie's paintings. He's trying to... how do you translate this whole, like what you see in one visual field, you can't put on a canvas, and it's the same thing with the book or movie, that challenge that Hadley has, as well, it's just nothing. Life is not really compatible in a one-to-one way and so art is entirely about making choices, and there's sort of infinite choices to be made.

Jack Wrighton 1:08:11
Yes, yeah, absolutely and I feel Yeah, the expense of the novel, you know, I loved when reading it, you come across a chapter, which is about the geological history of the area, Marian's growing up in and, you know, that's fantastic and yeah, I was interested in what because as you say, it starts kind of before she's born, you know, we meet, it's actually the people we meeting are the people that will employ her father, if that's the first people. So you know, this is kind of like, we're meeting kind of, there's different layers to it and you know, that, as you say, there's a great sort of expanse to it and did that just come naturally, because of the sort of, you know, the great expanse of her journey, you know?

Maggie Shipstead 1:08:55
Yeah, I mean, so much of it just comes down to random impulses in the moment, especially because I don't, I can't plot in advance I think I would love to, like it just doesn't work for me and so it's like, if I'm like, I know, for the first part of the book I wrote is the beginning which is an excerpt from Marian's log book before she disappeared as always, I was reverse engineering the character like, okay, she would be born around here. How would this child become this woman? Like, what's that life like? But somehow, I also had this idea about this ocean liner sinking, and so I was like, I'm just gonna put it in like, which again, like, you know, sometimes with novels people be like, well, it's not necessary. It's like no, but nothing about a novel is necessary. That's sort of very capacious form, like, you can put stuff in and so it really evolved kind of bit by bit and then yeah, the first incomplete history I wrote was the one about Missoula and I'd spent two months in Missoula before I started writing when I wasn't even planning on setting the book there. I was hiking on the hillsides, you can see these weird sort of terraces almost sounds like what are those and then was hiking I came across a marker that said, this is the high watermark like 1000s of feet up of glacial lake Missoula and so then I realised that the lines I had seen on the hillsides were tidal lines from the different levels this glacial lake had been at thousands of years ago, and it just like blew my mind and so, you know, I put it in the book and the sitting in the water grisly section about this native person who we would now call transgender. He was a real person, I came across him in my research and sort of these explorers, you know, records and the one thing that got cut in those a significant chunk was I had an incomplete history of Antarctica that started in geological time, but it was like 500 pages in the book and my editor was like, you know, you've just asked people to read 500 pages plus, I don't think they want to see this sentence that's, like, 30 million years ago. It's probably true.

Jack Wrighton 1:11:06
I will say, I'd totally read that again. I know, I'm saying like, release the obituary, like, you know, do this, or this, or this additional material, maybe there'll be a sort of, you know, like, kind of The Lord of the Rings films, that could be like, a writer's cut of Great Circle. But yes, that's, you know, that's wonderful because then there's a great sort of sense in the book about how these kinds of big spaces, you know, that history is, you know, geological history is on such a big scale. It's like, how do you even comprehend that, but then it's really wonderful to see that done of like, oh, but actually, this has, you know, both the character but also your life, like this has an actual effect on like, kind of the life you live and like, the food you eat, or, you know, whatever. So again, there was a really nice, sort of, like, incorporating people into these big almost unfathomable landscapes and motions but actually realising that, you know, the effect that that has on on people was a lovely element of it. Maggie, I realised I've kept you far longer than I said I would. It's been really lovely chatting. For those of you out there who haven't read Great Circle, I cannot recommend it enough. It's a wonderful novel and it it really just kind of pulls you in and doesn't, doesn't release you until the end. It's available in our store on our website, and as I said, as well from any local independent in the UK and abroad, as well as Maggie's most recent book, You Have a Friend in 10a which is a collection of short stories, Maggie Shipstead, thank you so much for joining us on Mostly Books Meets.

Maggie Shipstead 1:12:52
Thank you it was a pleasure.

Sarah Dennis 1:12:56
All of the books mentioned during the podcast are available to buy from the Mostly Books website. This podcast has been presented and produced by members of the team at Mostly Books in Abingdon. If you enjoyed what you heard, please rate review and subscribe, because apparently it helps people find us.