But if she could choose, she would ask for lift. She would want to rise from her body and have it be like when she’d first gone up with Trout, as though she were being held aloft by pure possibility, as though she were about to see everything.
Acknowledgments
This is the third novel I’ve written with my editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin, and my appreciation and admiration for her inimitable blend of radical openness and incisive rigor only grow with each passing book. Paring down an unwieldy thousand-page manuscript into this slender wisp of a thing was not an easy process, but I couldn’t have wished or hoped for a better companion and guide.
My gratitude to my agent, Rebecca Gradinger, is both deep and wide. Her friendship, advocacy, patience, and collaboration have all been essential to my work and life for many years now. Also at Fletcher & Co., thanks to the one and only Grainne Fox, a cherished beacon of non-nonsenseness, and to Melissa Chinchillo, Christy Fletcher, Veronica Goldstein, Liz Resnick, and Brenna Raffe. Much love and many thanks to Michelle Weiner at CAA.
Thank you to my mother, this book’s first and most devoted reader, whose belief I wore like a splint during difficult moments. Thank you to my brother, Matthew, still and always a pilot though he no longer flies, who looked at a map with me almost seven years ago, grimaced at the route options for a north-south circumnavigation in 1950, and suggested the C-47. Thank you to my father for his staunch pride and his list of typos and to my uncle Steve for his soul-warming eagerness to read and his wholehearted embrace of Marian when he did.
I am grateful to have come to Knopf during the era of the late and legendary Sonny Mehta. I am grateful, also, to be present for the beginning of the era of his worthy successor, Reagan Arthur. Thanks to Paul Bogaards, Emily Reardon, Sara Eagle, Ruth Liebmann, Cameron Ackroyd, Nicholas Thomson, Cassandra Pappas, Kristin Fassler, and Ellen Feldman. Kelly Blair designed a beautiful jacket that everyone fell in love with immediately, an impossible feat. Sheepish apologies and ardent thanks to copyeditor Karla Eoff and proofreaders Annette Szlachta-McGinn and Susan VanOmmeren.
Thank you to Jane Lawson at Doubleday in the U.K. for her warmth, energy, and insight and to Bill Scott-Kerr at Transworld for his confidence, as well as to Tabitha Pelly, Ella Horne, and Laura Ricchetti. Thank you to Jo Thomson for the epic cover design.
I have been fortunate enough to work with many brilliant magazine editors who have taught me an enormous amount about writing and sent me on far-flung travel assignments that have informed both my experience of the world and the creation of this novel in essential ways. Thank you to Jesse Ashlock, Lila Battis, Jeffries Blackerby, Erin Florio, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, Jacqui Gifford, Pilar Guzman, Alex Hoyt, Chris Keyes, Thessaly LaForce, Michelle Legro, Peter Jon Lindberg, Nathan Lump, Alex Postman, Julian Sancton, Melinda Stevens, Flora Stubbs, John Wogan, and Hanya Yanagihara.
During the time I spent drafting and editing Great Circle, I was fortunate to receive crucial assistance in the form of fellowships, residencies, and a visiting writer gig from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brush Creek, Bread Loaf, The Arctic Circle, and the University of Tennessee. I was also lucky enough to happen to be hanging around the Museum of Mountain Flying at the Missoula airport one afternoon when two guys were going up for a spin in a 1929 Travel Air 6000 and invited me along. I have sadly lost their names, but I remain thankful for that serendipitous and immensely helpful flight.
I would like to express my thanks to the Hoover Institution at Stanford for safeguarding the papers of many female World War II pilots, including American ATA flyers Ann Wood-Kelly, Roberta Sandoz, and Jane Spencer. Access to their letters was invaluable to me. My research efforts were also aided by the Montana Memory Project and Brian Lanker’s PBS documentary They Drew Fire, where I first encountered the wartime Aleutian paintings of William F. Draper. I consulted too many books and other resources to list, but a handful of crucial texts include Aloft: Thoughts on the Experience of Flight by William Langewiesche, Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whitell, The Flying North by Jean Potter, Little America and Alone by Richard E. Byrd, Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines by Sally Van Wagenen Keil, Spreading My Wings by Diana Barnato Walker, The Stars at Night by Jacqueline Cochran, Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg, Fly the Biggest Piece Back by Steve Smith, and Antarctica by David Day. All errors are very much mine.
It might be odd to thank an inanimate entity, but I could not have surmounted the organizational challenges of this novel without the writing application Scrivener.
I can’t imagine muddling along these past years without the friendship of other writers. I cherish the daily text chatter of Manuel Gonzales, Margaret Lazarus Dean, and Ted Thompson and would be lost without their wit and insight. I’m thankful to Aja Gabel, Emma Rathbone, Joe Waechter, and Erica Lipez for being the core of my life in Los Angeles, and to Kirstin Valdez Quade and Jennifer duBois for being forever friends.