Former Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing Emily Strasser returned to campus to discuss her debut memoir, “Half-Life of a Secret” on Oct. 23. Strasser’s book combines historical and family research to create a timeline of her grandfather’s involvement in building nuclear weapons and the effects of that work on her family.
The book is a memoir but it is also imbued with deep historical research. Associate Professor of English CJ Hauser described the book as a piece of literature that crosses genres.
“I might call this a deeply researched memoir. I might call this a reckoning, as the subtitle does. I might call it a mystery, as Strasser tries to figure out who her grandfather was and how it affected him to do this work,” Hauser said. “The students and I had a hard time trying to describe the genre of this book because I think it insists that the personal and the historical are in relationship to each other. It insists that to talk about one without the other is to miss something crucial.”
Strasser opened her talk by reading the first few sentences of her book, which discuss a photograph she remembered as a child. It is of her grandfather standing in front of a nuclear blast of a bomb that he had helped build, something she did not realize until much later.
“We’re children, we don’t always question what’s around us and what’s taken as normal. It wasn’t until I was about to graduate from college that this memory came back with a searing insistence. It started to haunt me,” Strasser said. “I started to wonder, how can I understand my family and my origins in the context of this unspoken history?”
Strasser’s grandparents moved to the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., in 1943 in order for her grandfather to help engineer uranium for the first atomic bomb. Strasser, armed with a presentation and her years of research, discussed the Oak Ridge portion of the Manhattan Project, as well as the consequences. Throughout her presentation, she tied in her family’s personal connections and the mental health issues her grandfather and the next generations experienced as a result of the secret-keeping, or compartmentalization.
“During the war, compartmentalization disempowered workers. It separated them from a sense of responsibility and it numbed their consciences,” Strasser said. “And in Oak Ridge, it became internalized as a culture by the workers and within the city itself.”
Strasser’s research of her family’s history led her from Oak Ridge to Las Vegas to Hiroshima, where she attended the 70th anniversary remembrance ceremony of when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Junior Henry Galicich, a student in the Living Writers course this semester, commented on how Strasser’s talk added rich context to her book.
“I really enjoyed Strasser’s presentation. It was interesting to see how she weaved the story of her grandfather, George, and the story of the Manhattan Project together,” Galicich said. “‘Half-Life of a Secret’ was incredibly well-researched, and I definitely learned a lot of information I didn’t know previously.”
Hauser commented on how Strasser’s work is important not just for Strasser’s family, but for the wider world in general.
“We are lucky to have Emily as a guide through this history, and we are lucky to have Emily’s own reflections on what it means to grapple with the personal and national legacies into which we are born,” Hauser said. “Strasser writes, ‘This story is and isn’t personal. What I see in my childhood, in my family, is just a magnification of what I see in Oak Ridge and in the nation at large.’”
Professor of English and Creative Writing Jennifer Brice will discuss her essay collection “Another North” in the next Living Writers event on Nov. 6.
