Maggie Shipstead, GREAT CIRCLE

[1:22]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. I could not be more proud to announce today's sponsor and why they're sponsoring the podcast. Citizens of Humanity, which you may know as this amazing denim company, decided to do Stay Safe t shirts. They're available on Monday, May 3, and you can shop them exclusively on the Citizens of Humanity website, citizensofhumanity.com. A 100% of the retail selling price of every t shirt sold supports the Susan Felice Owens program for COVID nineteen vaccine research at Mount Sinai Health System, which I founded. I am over the moon grateful and excited that Citizens of Humanity is donating their proceeds of their Get Vaxxed shirts which are long sleeved unisex t shirts available in white or black and the retail price is $34 Go to Citizens of Humanity. Please go get one of these t shirts. And again, every t shirt sold supports vaccine research at Mount Sinai and the program that I founded to honor my late mother-in-law. Thank you Citizens of Humanity for choosing my charity to donate the proceeds to. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I am just so excited. So go check out Citizens of Humanity, the shirt, buy some jeans, go crazy, and just thank you. Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Great Circle, Astonish Me, and Seating Arrangements, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her latest novel is called A Great Circle. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A frequent contributor to travel magazines, she is often away from her home in Los Angeles. Welcome, Maggie. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Thanks for having me. Congratulations on Great Circle, your latest novel.

[3:56]Maggie Shipstead: Would you mind telling listeners what it's about and what inspired you to write it? Sure. It is about a female pilot who disappears in 1950 while trying to fly around the world north south over the Poles. And then it's also about a modern day movie star who is playing her in a biopic. It's kind of a hard book to describe. I can do it in like two sentences or in 400 sentences. So that's kind of the nuts and bolts. But it starts much earlier when the pilot's born and goes through her life, goes through World War two when she flew warplanes. And the the sort of smallest seed of the idea was I saw a statue of a pilot named Jean Batten at the airport in Auckland, New Zealand in 2012. And she was the first person ever to fly alone from London to Auckland. And there was a little plaque next to it with a quote from her which said, I was destined to be a wanderer. And so that sort of morphed into the first line of the book which is I was born to be a wanderer. And I was sort of casting about for a project at that point and I thought, oh, I should write a book about an aviatrix. And I didn't start writing for about two years just because I was busy with my second book, Astonish Me and started in 2014 with no game plan, no outline and did not expect it to take as long as it did. But here we are seven years later.

[5:17]Zibby Owens: Well, there's a lot in here. I mean, this could almost be like multiple books. Yeah. There's a lot of storyline. I mean, it's but it comes off beautifully. It's very impressive. I feel like it's not just the length. I feel like it is a hefty accomplishment, this book. The way you interwove all these things and yet made it like this narrative. And anyway, I'm I'm totally impressed and have to wonder, like, did you actually try to do the stunt at the end or like when she's falling into the the actresses in the plane and did you ever try to figure out what that would feel like yourself? Because it felt like you were in it in that moment and I was like, I wonder if the author

[5:53]Maggie Shipstead: did one of those things where she'd like experience this herself. Yeah. I'd really prefer not to know what it's like to fall on an airplane into into a cold No.

[6:04]Zibby Owens: Thank you. Oh my gosh. Well, it seems like you yourself have this wandering gene also. I mean, your articles from all over the world and even your beautiful oh my gosh. Your modern love piece about the elderly. Maybe I shouldn't say elderly. Older gent older salty gentlemen who you met on an expedition of sorts. Tell me about your own sort of wanderlust.

[6:28]Maggie Shipstead: Yeah. It's been a sort of slow motion developing thing in my life. I was a really shy child. I was very averse to anything resembling an adventure. And then sort of when I was a teenager, I became more interested in travel as people do. And after college, a friend and I got around the world plane tickets because that was kind of my first like adventure off on my own. But as far as writing for travel and the way I travel now, it's sort of evolved almost symbiotically with this novel. I started writing for magazines in 2015, which was within a few months of, maybe six months of when I started this book. My first assignment was to Hawaii. And having done that, I got a taste for it. And so I started pitching more travel and doing more and more. And it was sort of like the book was driving the sorts of places I pitched because I knew I wanted to see the polar regions. I knew I wanted to get sort of the sense of the scale of the planet, which was one of my preoccupations in writing the book. So as I did that also sort of as research for the book, then editors at magazines sort of were like, Oh, Maggie Shipstead is really into stark empty landscapes. And so I would get more assignments like that. And then I would travel for fun or end up somewhere sort of by accident. Like I stopped in the Cook Islands on a layover that you could just add for free going from LA to Auckland. And so then the Cook Islands kind of found their way into Marion's route and that sort of thing. So my travel was driving the book and the book was driving reshaped my life, my entire life and the the period I was writing because now that's a big part of my identity before the pandemic was a big part of how I spent my time. And it's really changed, yeah, the people I've I've met like the example of the man in modern my modern love feuds.

[8:16]Zibby Owens: There was a line by the way in that, and I just read it right before I talked to you. So it's and I copied and pasted so I could read it. But you said, I came to covet his confidence and intrepidness, and I realized my task was not to glom onto him, but to foster those qualities in myself to go out into the world in pursuit of what moves me. That's gorgeous. That's just so that's like the encapsulation of like when you're dating the person who might not be the right person to be dating but like you date him because you want to be part of what he offers you.

[8:44]Maggie Shipstead: Anyway. Yeah. He really enlarged my world. I mean, for people who haven't read it, I was on a travel assignment to the Sub Antarctic which is between New Zealand and Antarctica and met this expedition leader who's thirty years older than I am and we wanted to see each other again. And so the solution to that ended up being me coming on a trip to Antarctica. So I went on this five week long first date on a ship with no escape route. But he yeah, he's been to Antarctica 50 plus times. He has this incredible like there aren't very many people in the world that have that kind of knowledge of that place and that experience and you could just sort of do anything like we're at this cabin he had once and I was like reading a book in a beanbag chair and he'd sort of go by and he'd cut up a tree with a chainsaw and go by again and he's like digging a trail. I just I was so taken by the idea of being someone that competent, which I'm most certainly not. And it's really a life's work to to be that kind of person. So yeah, he he really opened up my world in a lot of different ways. I think my favorite was that your mother told you that you wouldn't like his body and that you wouldn't like his toenails.

[9:52]Zibby Owens: I mean,

[9:58]Zibby Owens: That's true. And the things I'm willing to tolerate in a relationship. But I like toenail my toenail threshold is pretty low. Mean.

[10:15]Zibby Owens: my gosh. And let's go back to seating arrangements because I remember reading that. That was not that long ago. When did that come out? 2012. Oh my gosh. Nine years ago. That was flying. I actually remember it now that I'm saying it. I was renting a house and I remember the room I was in reading it and come to think of it. Oh, I guess it was kind of a long time ago. I feel like the years since I've had kids just like kind of glomming chunk in my head. Right? Oh my gosh. Was it that long ago? But that was very different. That wasn't as travel focused at all. That was a family kind of a family drama over a course of almost a weekend, wasn't it? I mean, I have I should have gone back but No,

[10:51]Maggie Shipstead: that's exactly right. Okay. And my memory of it is not perfect either at this Yeah, it was really different. Both my first two books started as short stories and Seating Arrangements, I wrote the short story in my second year in graduate school. So I was 24. Wow. And then I wrote the book really when I was 25, I spent like nine months on Nantucket through the off season which I thought would be helpful and it really wasn't because it's completely different than the summer. And yeah, it was very contained. It was kind of what I'd been thinking about then maybe also I had a college boyfriend who's sort of very, very waspy. And so that came out of my sort of dipping a toe in that subculture. But yeah, it was more sort of satirical. Great Circle is much more earnest or more of a soul project or something. Yeah. I was definitely like I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's the book that I

[11:44]Zibby Owens: I like, but this doesn't seem like it's necessarily the same genre even, but still amazed. I mean, it's still great. I mean, this is what's so wonderful about how watching authors sort of like progress as you get older yourself. Do know I mean? And all the different forms and things they try and how great you know what I mean? You don't have to be locked into a certain type of literature.

[12:08]Maggie Shipstead: Right? Absolutely. Yeah. And I've always written, I have a short story collection coming out next summer. And like looking back at all those stories, they're all really, really different both in terms of form and subjects. So I've always really liked to sort of immerse in different things and then just sort of move on. But it's true like writing a book, my first two books I wrote the first drafts in under a year for each of them. And I think I had it in my head. I was like, oh, just turn out a book in here. It's no big deal. And so this book was a bit of a rude awakening. It was just so much more difficult to write. It was such a nightmare. But yeah, I mean, each book takes up a significant chunk of your actual life. So I've, gone from being in my late twenties for senior management, now I'm 37. And so when I recently had to kind of reread Astonish Me which was also in my twenties when I wrote and there are things about it that still really resonate with me, but it also does feel like the work of a much younger person. And it's sort of strange that like that was also me. But you just sort of have to make peace with the fact that you do the best you can at the time of your life you're in and and you move forward. Well, that was I mean, I didn't mean to imply it wasn't very good. It was No. No. No. No. Okay. You didn't. I was just it's more my judgment of of both those books in a way. I'm like, oh, I I just wanna do this the same way. Mhmm. You know, not even that I I think it's bad. I just think about things differently as you inevitably do as you get older.

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[16:49]Zibby Owens: Well, it's it's a pleasure then to be able to watch. I mean, most people don't live in recorded ways like this. Right? You don't get to like, even my closest friends, I don't get to necessarily like, you develop with them. This is a ridiculous point and I'll let it go. No. You're absolutely But to have like these moments in time to turn back to, it's they because you they can't like morph along with you. Yeah.

[17:14]Maggie Shipstead: And it it I mean, as an author, it feels like you're sort of like you're like leaving a buoy like behind in the past, you know, like this is where I was then.

[17:24]Zibby Owens: And like whatever happened to those characters? I know. Right? Are they still in their house? Like I feel like you created that house. Like I have it in my head. Like I can picture it. It might not be anything like what you wanted but like the pic I can picture in my head the book, the house from that book very clearly. And like, are those characters still there? What are all the where do all these characters go that are made up? Mean I know. Yeah. Was I was really I never considered that. And then when I was touring for seating arrangements, I had a couple people ask me like, what's Olivia doing now?

[17:54]Maggie Shipstead: And I was like, I don't know. Like, she got eaten by a shark. What do you want me to say? Like, she's a fictional construct.

[18:02]Zibby Owens: But then they become so real, especially when they're well written and like you just they just live in your minds. I mean, anyway, do you feel ever any sort of sadness? Like, I know you said it was kind of a nightmare, but now that this project is over, like, do you miss going into like, what was it like even at the time? Like, how what was your daily life like writing this book? Or at the most intense points I should ask, like, are you did you have really long writing days or did you do a little bit over seven years? Or like, what was it like? Yeah.

[18:32]Maggie Shipstead: I'm when I'm really in it, I will write almost every day. And in non pandemic times, I like to sort of bribe myself. I'll be like, you can go get coffee, but you have to work. So I'd go to a cafe in my neighborhood and work. I think there were long, relatively long writing days. Generally, I wouldn't work all day, I would kind of work in the morning and I would intend to go back to it in the afternoon and I would usually get caught up with other things. But the first draft of Great Circle which took me three years and three months to write was nine eighty pages long. Oh my gosh. So I remember maybe two years in having written more than 400 pages longer than either of my other books. I sort of had this realization that I wasn't halfway done. And it was so overwhelming just to think that I had to do that over again. Like I wasn't I just knew I wasn't close and I sort of thought like, is there some way I can streamline this or something I can take out? And ultimately, I just had to sort of focus on what I could do in each day, you know, it was like an ant moving a pile of crumbs from one place to another and you just have to do it one crumb at a time. And so I just kept at it and I, with the knowledge that it was gonna be too long and sure enough, once my editor and I started working, we cut fully a quarter. The actual book length is about 600 pages, it's not short but that's like 700 and something manuscript pages. So it lasts a lot of weight mostly just through pervasive cutting. But because I don't outline, I also felt like I was building a house without blueprints, you know, and there's like a turret and like a staircase to nowhere and all these rooms and I just really had to keep going. And what I found with lots of my books is there's some strange psychological process at work because as I get further into it and run into problems, I will often find the solutions earlier in the book. And so I think there's some part of your brain that can hold the whole thing. Like it always feels to me like I can't hold the whole thing in my mind. And when I would go back and read a draft, I'd find the loose ends or people I'd forgotten about or whatever but there's something there at work that sort of let me bind it all together despite having a totally disorganized process and researching as I went along. So I'd accumulate all these books about random subjects and just I kinda just had to hope for the best. Just like hope you can land the plane.

[21:07]Zibby Owens: Like that analogy. What about tell me a little more about the loss that pervades this book and having like the the current day character having had her parents pass away and then as her uncle's, you know, debauchery sort of progresses throughout the book what ends up happening with him and how she sort of left to her own devices in a way that kids aren't as much anymore. Tell me a little bit more about that

[21:31]Maggie Shipstead: through line. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I think especially in children's literature, they're just like orphans everywhere. Every child is orphaned and raised by a eccentric uncle. And so I kind of just did that. For Marion, the pilot, I was interested in her having an ultra free range childhood. So this is in Missoula in the nineteen twenties and she has a twin brother. They've survived a shipwreck. It sounds really outlandish. I'm sorry, it sort of makes sense. And are living with her uncle and she as a child, it just doesn't occur to her that there are any limitations on her freedom. She can go wherever she can get to, she can do whatever she can get away with. And this is really deeply instilled in her. And so as she grows up and comes to this understanding that she has to be a pilot, like it's just in her. She's a little bit surprised that people don't wanna teach a 14 year old girl how to fly a plane and so she has to come up with other means to do what she wants. But then with Hadley, the movie star, one of the challenges in constructing the book was connecting the two stories which they're quite different people, different eras. And so I wanted to create these little resonances and so Hadley also has lost her parents and is raised by an uncle but in Hollywood and he's in the movie business and so he sort of gets her into the movie business too. But I think it, you know, one of my things that I thought about a lot was just the task of knowing what kind of life you want and then doing what's necessary to create that and then protect it. And so in some ways by sort of isolating the characters from normal family structure, it sort of brought that to the forefront. Like it had to be a much more active quest on their part to sort of choose in a vacuum how they're going to live and and what they wanna do with their time. I think you had some funny line about how reality is

[23:30]Zibby Owens: how you can't you can't have like a true sense of reality when you're like brought to sets as a child to like child star every day. I can't I should have like underlined it or whatever. Of course, I won't be able to find it now. Oh, no. But I was gonna talk I wanted to ask you about this other scene too. I don't usually jump around this much, but this was like okay. I'm just gonna read this so we can just discuss it really quickly. For Annabelle, the horror of the birth had merged with the horror of the war now that she knew what it was to scream, to bleed. The birth had become the new trouble to which her mind returned when she let her guard down. The basin of red water reappeared, the doctor's knives and forceps and sewing needles. She saw again the purple purple infant. This is, like I don't know why I wanted to read this. This is not what I expected you to read. I don't know. Why was I reading it? No. I wanted to read the part about well, I don't know. I not only did I dog ear the page, but I like made a note. Anyway, I think I thought I don't even know. The birth. The combination of like the horrors of war and the horrors of childbirth, think was something that stuck with me. But Yeah. This is this is a character who's Mariam's mother

[24:31]Maggie Shipstead: and is has trauma in her life and would we would not describe as stable. Did not intend just to have children and and here she is. And yeah. I'd I'd I don't have children. So there's no babies to be offended by my horrific description of birth. Oh my gosh.

[24:52]Zibby Owens: Well, okay. So you have your collection of short stories coming, which is exciting. Can you are there any that you can highlight now? Or Well, there's one story that's kind of connected to this book very indirectly and it was a story

[25:05]Maggie Shipstead: I wrote also in sort of an intense So in Great Circle, Marion's sections are in third person and Hadley's are in first person. And so this one story called You Have Friend in 10A which I think is gonna be the title of the collection is also sort of this intense first person voice of a movie star but it's more of a take on Scientology. And so that voice kind of set me up to write Hadley and also was sort of an experiment in drawing on stories that people are already sort of familiar with just ambiently through celebrity culture. Like with Hadley, I think we're familiar with sort of the Harvey Weinstein type character that she encounters and we're familiar with this sort of young adult book franchise that becomes a movie that she stars in. And so I like to sort of take advantage of that that's already sort of in readers minds. So yeah, in some ways short stories for me have always been kind of a laboratory where I can try new things and then apply them to other work. Yeah, seating arrangements started as a story I needed to expand and Astonish Me weirdly started as a story I needed to make shorter. And And when I went to make it shorter instead, made it 90 pages and

[26:19]Zibby Owens: just kept writing. So do you think you're going to do another novel length project or are you working on anything longer? Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

[26:29]Maggie Shipstead: I had sort of a few false starts in the past year and I would write when I get going, I can write quite quickly. And so I've written, I don't know, 70 or 80 pages of a couple of different things and that just wasn't quite working. And to start a project, I really need a couple of things to come together and it could be different things. Like it could be a voice and a setting or it could be two characters or something like that. I just need sort of an intersection. And so then I was able to take sort of pieces from these discarded projects and fit them together differently. So now I have a novel going that I think has momentum. And right now I'm mostly just doing great circle stuff but I've written about a 100 pages and it's set in LA and is about a family but in sort of a complex way. And I guess my starting point was this question of what if you marry what if two people are married and have never liked each other but stay married forever?

[27:30]Zibby Owens: Wow. I think that's a question a lot of people are thinking about right now. Maybe. Maybe. Unfortunately. Yeah. Anecdotally from what I hear. I don't know.

[27:39]Maggie Shipstead: You know? Awesome. So what advice would you have for aspiring authors? I mean, probably everyone says this, but I really think that reading is the most important thing an aspiring writer can do more than writing. I didn't really write fiction at all until late college. And I also think it's as much as possible, like as a person I have ego but I try to keep my ego out of my writing. It's not and not have it be about proving anything, not be thinking about who's reading it. Actually don't think about readers much at all. I just think about kind of plowing forward with what I'm doing and closing everything else out including sort of myself.

[28:18]Zibby Owens: Excellent. Great. Well, Maggie, thank you. I'm sorry I was sort of jumping all over the place today with questions about the book and your life and I don't even know. So sorry. Thanks for bearing with me.

[28:30]Maggie Shipstead: Thanks for having me. No. It's such a long book that it's sort of impossible to talk about without being like

[28:36]Zibby Owens: completely piecemeal. I've learned this. In fact, I I did this on purpose to mirror the ways in which the narrative shifts from different timelines and different perspectives. How about that? Oh, so subtle and nuanced. Thank you. I try. Alright. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It'd be great to talk to you. You too. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you again to citizens of humanity for sponsoring this episode and for donating all the proceeds of your long sleeve unisex t shirts that are available for getting vaxxed, the retail price is $34 to the Susan Felice Owens program for COVID-nineteen vaccine research at Mount Sinai Health System. Go to citizensofhumanity.com, chat, and check them out. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music. Hey. I'm Neveah from Culver's. And let me tell you, we have the perfect summer treat available in restaurants right now. The Oreo Reese's Cheesecake Concrete Mixer. It's a mouthful, literally. It's rich and creamy, fresh frozen custard swirled with Oreo cookie pieces, Reese's peanut butter cups, and bites of cheesecake. So what are you waiting for? Order ahead with the Culver's app, and let us craft one fresh just for you. From Wisconsin with love, welcome to delicious. Oreo is a trademark of the Mondelez International Group used under license. The Reese's trademark and trade dress are used under license.