Circling the Sun (39 page)

W
riting fiction about people who actually lived is somewhat like skydiving. All sorts of things have me flinging myself out into space toward my story—curiosity, imagination, an ineffable connection to my characters, and, let’s face it, some strange love of the sensation of falling. But it’s the research that gives me my parachute. Concrete sources anchor and ground me and make my process possible. They tell me what I need to know in order to invent what I must as a novelist—and for this I am thankful and humbled.
West with the Night,
Beryl’s own account of her incredible life, compelled me to learn more about her, was the source of ignition for my novel, and is a phenomenal work in its own right.

Mary Lovell’s
Straight On Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham
was the first biography to bring Beryl to light, in 1987, and her pioneering efforts and careful research have been crucial to my own and other writers’ abilities to imagine Beryl’s life. Mary Lovell also compiled Beryl Markham’s stories in
The Splendid Outcast,
a collection that wouldn’t have been available otherwise, and for that we should all be grateful. Finally, Lovell’s sympathetic view of Beryl was an important touchstone for me as I worked.

Other important sources were
Out of Africa
and
Shadows on the Grass,
by Isak Dinesen;
African Hunter,
by Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke;
The Lives of Beryl Markham
and
Silence Will Speak,
by Errol Trzebinski;
Never Turn Back,
by Catherine Gourley;
Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton,
by Sara Wheeler;
Isak Dinsesen: The Life of a Storyteller,
by Judith Thurman; and Isak Dinesen’s
Letters from Africa, 1914–1931,
translated by Anne Born.

Incredibly beneficial in helping me conjure both colonial Kenya and the lives of these British expats were
The Flame Trees of Thika
and
Nine Faces of Kenya: Portrait of a Nation,
by Elspeth Huxley;
The Bolter,
by Frances Osborne;
The Ghosts of Happy Valley,
by Juliet Barnes;
The Tree Where Man Was Born,
by Peter Matthiessen;
Swahili Tales,
by Edward Steere; and
Kenya: A Country in the Making, 1880–1940,
by Nigel Pavitt.

Circling the Sun

The Paris Wife

A Ticket to Ride

Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses: A Memoir

P
AULA
M
C
L
AIN
is the author of
The Paris Wife,
a
New York Times
and international bestseller. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. McLain is also the author of two collections of poetry; a memoir,
Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses;
and a first novel,
A Ticket to Ride.
She lives in Cleveland with her family.