When her writing is going really well, when she is "all in," Paula McLain, author of the best-selling historical novel The Paris Wife, calls herself "a head in a jar." All brain, no body.

The feeling, McLain says, is "of being in a deep-sea diving bell. You go down, down, down until you hear those pings coming off the ocean floor. You're not reachable. You're not conscious of time passing. Whole hours disappear and you're completely absorbed."

That was the opposite of what McLain was feeling a few years ago when her brother-in-law, a doctor and pilot, forced upon her a copy of West with the Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham, the British-born Kenyan bush pilot who, in 1936, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. At that time McLain was writing a historical novel about Marie Curie. It wasn't working. When she wrote The Paris Wife, McLain had felt a deep connection to Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, that allowed her "to believe absolutely, unequivocally that I understood her enough that I could follow her down a rabbit hole to Paris in 1922. But with Marie it was like being kicked out of heaven every single day of the writing."

The Markham memoir sat on McLain's bookshelf unread while she suffered. "Then one day when I was in the midst of despair, I picked it up and read one paragraph about her African childhood and thought: What have I been doing!" says McLain, who, when excited, speaks in a headlong rush. 

"There was nothing subtle about it. I just knew I was going to write about her. In fact I wrote my agent that day and said, I'm ditching the Marie Curie book and writing about Beryl Markham. And she's like, oh, please let's not tell Random House. So for months and months I had to lie to my editor, I had to lie to my publisher. How are things going? Still working, still working. And, meanwhile, I was just lighting up the African bush in my imagination, writing really fast and having a really good time." McLain finished a near-final draft of Circling the Sun, her novel about Markham, in five months.

In addition to being an aviation pioneer, Markham was the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya. Her mother moved home to England when Markham was very young, and she grew up a wild child, running with the native Kipsigis children while her father built up his farm and stable of racing horses. As a young woman she was unusually tall and strikingly attractive. She was thrice married, unhappily, beginning at age 16. Because of her beauty, independence and adventurousness, she was a magnet for rumors about her romantic life, some of them undoubtedly true. Even today, almost 30 years after her death at age 83, Markham remains a subject of salacious gossip, as McLain discovered during a recent research trip to Kenya.

Writing a convincing, memorable novel about Markham and the society of that era in Kenya, as she has done in Circling the Sun, presented McLain with a host of challenges. First off was the fact the Markham had already told her own story in West with the Night. 

Re-reading the memoir and comparing it to biographies of Markham, McLain began to notice that "Beryl was very, very selective in what she chose to tell." McLain examined the gaps and "thought, oh my god! This is a woman on the run. This is a sphinx. This is a woman like Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast who leaves all the pertinent stuff out. There are almost no women here. She doesn't talk about her friendship with Karen Blixen. She uses a kind of dazzle camouflage. I wanted to figure out what created the engine of her psyche. I wondered, how does a person like Beryl get made."

So Circling the Sun became a coming-of-age story that explored the emotional complexity of Markham's personal and romantic life. The transatlantic flight bookends the novel as a near-death experience that permits Markham to acknowledge some difficult truths about her life. "Someone like Beryl would actually need to be at the verge of death in order to confess some of this stuff," McLain explains.

McLain feels the reason she was able to write so vividly about Markham's childhood is her deep sense of connection with her heroine. Like Markham, McLain and her sisters, who grew up in Fresno, California, were abandoned by their mother at an early age, a subject she wrote about in the 2003 memoir Like Family. "I believed I knew something about the wildness she was talking about. I felt I knew what it was like to be let loose to explore that really difficult world."

Some of the best scenes in the novel are the horseracing scenes, where Markham proves herself in a male-dominated world. Here too, McLain attributes the success of these scenes to her connectedness with Markham. "I grew up sort of the way Beryl did, meaning that from childhood I was super physical with horses. Like saddling up the pony and launching over the landscape with my sisters and not coming back until dinnertime. I understand Beryl's attachment to the physical animal and that sense of freedom, of flying along in an untethered, unbounded way."

Developing the details of other sections of the novel—colonial and native life in Kenya during the early years of the 20th century, for example—McLain employed a sort of just-in-time research, gathering facts just ahead of composing the next section of her novel. Her biggest challenge, she says, was sorting through all the conflicting accounts and gossip about Markham's life, especially her love life. "I had to let some of this stuff go," she says, laughing. "It's provocative, it's scintillating, but I'm not writing Fifty Shades of Grey."

Instead, the novel concentrates on dramatizing Markham's most important relationships: her complex lifelong friendship with a Kenyan man named Ruta, the circumstances of her three unsatisfying marriages; and her emotionally fraught affair with the love of her life, pilot and hunting guide Denys Finch Hatton, who was at the same time in a relationship with her friend Karen Blixen, author of the memoir Out of Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. 

Movie fans will remember Meryl Streep's portrayal of Blixen and Robert Redford's portrayal of Finch Hatton in the film Out of Africa. McLain admits, laughing, that it was impossible for her not to picture Redford as she wrote about this relationship. 

"It's my favorite movie. All I have to do is watch two minutes in the middle of the night, and I'm reduced to tears. But I had to dismember and complicate it to tell my story. I know that there will be readers who will be really ticked with me for doing that. But telling the true story doesn't mean that Denys and Karen didn't really love each other. It just means that they were really, really intricate people."

McLain pauses and shifts subjects to say that, in her view, Markham was sustained throughout her life by a warrior spirit she developed as a child. When her life went off the rails, as it did in many of her romantic relationships, it was because "she crosses her own lines and loses herself. She loses the connection with her personal power that came from that early childhood identity."

Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. "You know, there's a line at the end of my book that goes, ‘This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.' That's something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don't get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That's an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true."

 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Doing what she did with such smashing success in The Paris Wife, a portrait of Hadley Richardson's marriage to Ernest Hemingway backdropped by sparkling 1920s Paris, McLain retells the life of another dramatic figure of the era: Beryl Markham, horse trainer, adventurer, and aviator par excellence in far-off Kenya. Beryl survives her mother's abandonment and her father's eventual bankruptcy to become an unconventional force to be reckoned with in the insular British expat colony, forming a triangle with Karen Blixen and her lover Denys Finch Hatton while finding her true self in the skies.

Famed aviator and renowned racehorse trainer Beryl Markham is only one of the subjects of McLain's captivating new novel. The other is Kenya, the country that formed the complicated, independent woman whom Markham would become. Like her father who raised her, she falls under the spell of Kenya's lush valleys and distant mountains. Here she nurtures her affinity for animals in the wild and learns to breed and tame the most recalcitrant thoroughbreds. But when war and weather affect life at their farm in Ngoro, Beryl's father pressures the 16-year-old into marrying a much older, financially stable neighbor, setting in motion Markham's long history of fleeing the constraints of relationships that threaten her keen desire to live life on her own terms. Only on the back of a horse, at the wheel of a car, or, later, flying over her beloved Africa does she feel fully alive and free. Drawing on Markham's own memoir, West with the Night, McLain vividly introduces this enigmatic woman to a new generation of readers. VERDICT Fictional biography is a hot commodity right now (think Melanie Benjamin or Nancy Horan), and McLain's The Paris Wife was a book group darling. Expect nothing less for this intriguing window into the soul of a woman who refused to be tethered. [See Prepub Alert, 1/5/15.]—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

McLain's (The Paris Wife) latest showcases her immersive command of setting and character, fictionalizing the exploits of real-life aviator and author Beryl Markham in British Kenya in the early 20th century. Beryl marries young when her father's fortunes fall, but is determined to strike out independently as a horse trainer, even though there are no female horse trainers and she's only in her late teens. She succeeds, though her marriage suffers, and finds herself drawn into a love triangle with famed hunter Denys Finch Hatton and writer Karen Blixen. While her successes in the horse-racing business increase, the scandal around her makes her flee to England for a while. Upon her return to Kenya, her need for freedom has further personal consequences, but also leaves her as the first professional female pilot in the world at a time when flying was exceptionally dangerous, and a record-setter for crossing the Atlantic. McLain paints an intoxicatingly vivid portrait of colonial Kenya and its privileged inhabitants. Markham's true life was incredibly adventurous, and it's easy for readers to identify with this woman who refused to be pigeonholed by her gender. Readers will enjoy taking in the rich world McLain has created. (July)