Ty Bannerman is the author of the new book Nuclear Family: A Memoir of the Atomic West. He is the cohost of the podcast City on the Edge, and he's based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?
A: A memoir is, I suppose, an attempt to understand one’s place in the world. To take the pieces of a life and form them into an artistic reflection of the self that, hopefully, others can relate to and find meaning in as well.
So, the inspiration is the impulse to understand myself, using all these “clues” about the world, the intimate histories of those who share characteristics with me, right down to trying to understand the nature of reality itself.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: One of the themes of the book is the universal connection between all people, partly because of the nuclear age we live in, forever changed by the Trinity test in 1945, and partly because of the very makeup of our existence at the atomic level. Humanity (and all of everything) is the “nuclear family” in this sense.
But a fair amount of the book is devoted to my own actual sociological nuclear family unit, standing in as a sort of microcosm of the greater whole. So how could I possibly resist giving the book this title?
Q: The author V.B. Price called the book “a fascinating and thoroughly enthralling insider’s look at the intimate impact that both the national security establishment and radioactivity itself can have on a family associated with the operations of the Manhattan Project and its evolution into the shadow world of mutually assured destruction.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: It’s a wonderfully kind assessment, first of all. And that’s definitely one aspect of the book; the core metaphor has to do with my family’s tangential relationship with the nuclear weapons industry in its early days, and the book moves outward from there to revel in these various connections.
My main focus is on the poetic connections between things as disparate as theoretical physics, intrafamily dynamics and history, and I’ve certainly tried to fold in a bit of political reality as well. We live under threat of these immensely powerful weapons, and we’re all in this together.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: It’s a strange feeling, like I’ve sent out several thousand messages in bottles and I have no idea where they’re going end up or who is going to read them. All I can do is hope that they get rescued and read by folks who find them meaningful, who can relate to the message.
It’s an incredibly vulnerable feeling, given how personal a memoir is. You make a gift of yourself, something you think is beautiful and true and all you can do is hope that others understand and relate to the message and maybe, hopefully, see some of the beauty there. My hope is that the readers accept this, and find their meaning there as well.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have this intense interest in early Coney Island history that I’ve been pursuing. I suppose there are some similarities to that and Los Alamos, in that they are both artificial environments built for a world-changing purpose.
Of course, Coney Island is all about amusement culture, but so much of the world we currently live in is reflected in that crazy island and the madmen who created it.
At the moment, that interest is manifesting into a sort-of-magical-realism novel I’m working on and a YouTube series about the history. I’ve been thinking about pursuing it as a nonfiction book as well, just getting into the stories of that time and the personalities involved as well as the modern-day folks who still carry a torch for the island’s history.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m just really overwhelmed and honored by the fact that this book is now out in the world and people are actually reading it! Thank you to everyone who picks it up.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment