review of great circle by maggie shipstead

That changed when, on a sophomore impulse, she took a creative writing class with novelist and Radcliffe Institute Fellow Lan Samantha Chang (now the program director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). “It was very difficult for me to not be judgmental,” she says, laughing, “which is a basic tenet of that field.” She switched to English and began picturing an academic career.

She briefly considered concentrating in anthropology, but one introductory class changed her mind. “My freshman year I got a B, and I’d never gotten even an A- in high school, and my parents were like, ‘Good for you! Take it down a notch! Have a good time for once!’” With time, she learned to temper her competitiveness and immerse herself in the academic experience. She started two days after 9/11, and still recalls the palpable sorrow hanging over fellow students, many of them East Coasters.

Shipstead says she entered as an “aggressive” high-school graduate, but the environment caused some culture shock. Harvard was a clearer path: her father attended the College, and her mother the Graduate School of Education.

Her mother, she says, sometimes suggested otherwise, “Like, ‘Well, maybe…you’ll be a writer one day,’ and I was really resistant to that idea.” The current Los Angeles resident-born in Orange County, but peripatetic for a few years in-between-remembers reading as having a more prominent role in her life than writing. It may seem odd that Maggie Shipstead ’05, whose third novel, Great Circle, arrives this spring, didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer.

Review of great circle by maggie shipstead