Great Circle

In 1950, a female aviator named Marian Graves writes in her logbook during her doomed attempt to fly around the world. She writes about how she has always promised herself that her “last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge” (11). Marian is in Antarctica having flown a long distance already. She knows her attempt may seem foolish, but she insists that she had no choice but to chase after the horizon. She did not expect her trip to go this way, but now she faces one last challenge: flying over the wide sea to reach New Zealand. 

In Los Angeles in 2014, a young actor named Hadley Baxter describes how she first learned about Marian Graves’s life while reading a random library book. Hadley’s own parents died in a plane crash, so Marian’s story immediately interested her. Just like Marian, Hadley was raised by her uncle, a man named Mitch who works as a television director and seemed ill-equipped to raise a child. Mitch helped Hadley discover her talent for acting, and she grew up to work in Hollywood. She worked in sitcoms in her early teens and began to spend too much time with older teenagers at parties.