Ciera Horton McElroy is the author of the new novel Atomic Family. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including AGNI and Bridge Eight, and she lives in St. Louis.
Q: What inspired you to write Atomic Family, and how did you create the Porter family?
A: Atomic Family is inspired by my own family history.
My grandfather—who died in 1976, nearly 20 years before I was born—was a chief agronomist, responsible for disposing nuclear waste at the Savannah River Plant (SRP). At the time, this meant burying irradiated materials in the ground. This also meant his work was top secret: his wife and son knew nothing about his other life.
When I was growing up, my father would tell me stories about what life was like in the Cold War: from duck & cover drills to his dad’s top secret work, I always found this era fascinating and under-represented in literary works. The Porter family is definitely fictional, but heavily inspired by my family history.
Q: The writer Brenda Peynado called the book “a Mrs. Dalloway updated for the nuclear age, an intense excavation of memory, trauma, and hope.” What do you think of that description, and can you say more about the connections between the two books?
A: Atomic Family is a circadian novel—which means that like Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses, it takes place within the time span of 24 hours. Structurally speaking, this connects the two books in that the plot is compressed to examine the lives of the characters within the confines of an ordinary day.
In my novel, Nellie is a disgruntled housewife who struggles with the effects of her husband’s secretive work.
Like Clarissa Dalloway, I think Nellie is struggling with the social expectations for women in her time. On one hand, she resents them: but at the same time, she buys into what the media tells her she should want. (Like a luxury lifestyle.) This leads to financial conflict with her husband, among their many other marital conflicts.
Q: The novel is set in the early 1960s--how did you research the time period, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I had to do so much research for this book! Not only about the 1960s but about atomic weapons manufacturing... since I’m not a physicist!
I had several different strategies. It was important to me to read research books about the 1960s, but also books from the 1960s. (Example: Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, which is the pivotal Cold War novel from 1959.) I found that this strategy was especially helpful for finding voice, tone, and even the cultural perspective toward the USSR at the time.
In addition, I would watch documentaries and listen to music from the era, as that was another level of immersion. For the scientific work, I actually found and read my grandfather’s old declassified reports!
One interesting thing I learned: the Kennedy administration urged American civilians to build their own fallout shelters, even though they knew these shelters wouldn't work. It was a big publicity campaign to make people feel safe.
But in reality, if there was nuclear war, those little shelters would have done pretty much nothing. And we knew that! (Kennedy even pushed for $207 million dollars from Congress for this fallout shelter program.)
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: I hope people reflect on the way war—and even war games, war rhetoric, the threat of terror—can affect children.
My earliest memory was 9/11, and I can't really separate this book from my childhood anxieties over terrorist attacks and school shootings. We have just replaced duck & cover drills with active shooter drills. I wanted to explore what this does to our psyche. The Cold War anxiety of constantly waiting for something bad to happen.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now I am working on a new novel, title to be announced. It's a contemporary reimagining of Jack Kerouac and the “road novel.”
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: You can visit the atomic facility that the book is based on! It's now the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina, and they have tours with public access.
You'll be able to see (as I did!) where the nuclear “graveyards” are—literally where they buried nuclear waste. You can see the now-defunct reactors, the lab, the archives, and the remains of the town of Ellenton, which the government moved by eminent domain. All of this is documented in the novel!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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