![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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