Atmosphere

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a best-selling author from the United States. She has written nine novels, including The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & the Six, Malibu Rising, Carrie Soto is Back, and Atmosphere. Jenkins Reid was born in Maryland and moved with her family to Massachusetts when she was 12 years old. She went on to graduate from Emerson College in Boston with a degree in Media Studies. She started her career working on movies and TV series, where she met her husband, the screenwriter Alex Jenkins Reid. Jenkins Reid quit her job in 2011 to focus on writing a novel, which eventually became her first book, Forever, Interrupted. Jenkins’s Reid’s 2017 book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was a bestseller and breakout success. Her next book after that, Daisy Jones & the Six—a fictional oral history of a 1970s band that bears some resemblance to Fleetwood Mac—was another bestseller. Reese Witherspoon also chose that book for her book club. Jenkins Reid and her husband now live in Los Angeles with their daughter.

Atmosphere takes place at NASA in the 1980s. NASA is a U.S. federal agency that was formed in 1958 with the goal of furthering the understanding of space through scientific research and space exploration. NASA’s first human spaceflight missions were conducted under Project Mercury, which accomplished its goal of sending a person into orbit and then having them return safely to Earth. NASA’s Apollo program then followed, and that program ran from 1968 to 1972. Through those missions, NASA landed the first person on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, in 1969. Before the successful mission to the Moon, though, NASA experienced a major tragedy when a fire broke out during the rehearsal of the Apollo 1 launch. That fire killed all three astronauts involved in the exercise, including Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee. Atmosphere references that tragedy. The book also discusses Sally Ride, who, in 1983, became the first woman from the United States to travel to space. In that book, that occurs shortly before Joan and Vanessa travel to space in 1984. Atmosphere takes place during the beginning of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, which began in 1981 and lasted until 2011. Atmosphere also focuses on the dangers of being an astronaut and a deadly accident that occurs on a fictional Space Shuttle named Navigator. Two deadly accidents occurred in real life on Space Shuttles. In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. All seven crew members on board died. In 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The seven crew members on board that Space Shuttle also died.

Atmosphere is Jenkins Reid’s ninth novel and shares similar themes with her other novels, many of which are set in the past and center on people as they embark on journeys involving romance and self-discovery. Some of Jenkins Reid’s most well-known novels include The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & the Six, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto is Back. Atmosphere also highlights the inequities of the workplace for women in the 1980s. Though the novel Lessons in Chemistry takes place in the 1960s instead of the 1980s, it similarly highlights the misogyny and sexism that women faced when working in a STEM field that was predominantly made up of men. Several nonfiction books have been written about NASA, including Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, about the vital role that Black women mathematicians played in NASA in the 1950s and 1960s; and The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, about the first astronauts NASA selected for spaceflight missions. At the end of the book, Jenkins Reid also cites several books that she read to help with the writing process of Atmosphere, including Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger; The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush; Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control by Paul Dye; and The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby