Emily Strasser Reckons With a Family Secret

July 11, 2023

~ This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. ~

Weekends and summers at Emily Strasser’s grandmother’s house near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were usually spent swimming in the lake, gathering with cousins, and listening to family stories told by Strasser’s aunts and uncle. But when a vivid memory of a photo that once hung above the space where she slept at the lake house came back to Emily when she was in college, she began a 10-year journey to find not only the photograph itself, which had been lost over the years, but to understand more about her eccentric grandfather, George Strasser, and his involvement in building the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

Some answers were easier to find than others: Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities built as part of the Manhattan Project to produce the atomic bomb. George was a farmer’s son turned chemist who worked for more than 30 years at the Y-12 National Security Complex, beginning in 1943. The Oak Ridge site was responsible for the enrichment of uranium during World War II and later for lithium isotope separation continuing on through the Cold War. But within those answers lay many more questions about George’s deep mental health struggles, the complexity of memory, and the reverberating impact of the atomic bomb in Tennessee and beyond. 

The Bitter Southerner’s assistant editor, Rachel Priest, talked with author Emily Strasser about family reckonings, researching a memoir, and finding hope within the unknown future of nuclear weapons. 

Rachel Priest: How did this book come about? 

Emily Strasser: I was about to graduate from college and, at this precipice of adulthood, thinking about what kind of person I was going to be in the world. What does it mean to live a good life? All of a sudden, this memory from childhood came back — very, very vibrantly — of this photograph of my grandfather standing in front of a nuclear test blast. This was a photograph that hung in my grandmother’s house above the bed where I slept when I was a child.

As a kid, you don’t question what is in your family’s houses, you don’t question what’s normal around you. And so I didn’t think much of it, but it did fill me with a kind of a sense of awe and fear. I did know that my grandfather had worked building nuclear weapons, but I didn't know a lot about that because we never, ever talked about that history. And this didn't really align with the way I understood my family. I grew up going to Quaker school, and we couldn't keep score at recess soccer games because that was considered a form of violence. 

So I just started to pick at that history. I felt compelled to understand, What is the legacy of this work? Why did he do this work? How did it affect him? How did it affect the family? I never knew this grandfather, but I knew that he had had deep mental health struggles. But we only talked about it in a kind of clinical way. And so there were these sort of twin secret histories that felt related to me, and I didn't know exactly how they were related. But I started to pull at those threads. It started off as a way of thinking about how to be in the world where I came from, my own origin story, and then grew into confronting this vast legacy of nuclear weapons in our country and in the world.

RP: You did 10 years of research for this book — even traveling to the test site in Nevada and to the bombing sites in Japan. How did you distill all of those experiences and the sheer amount of research into a book that’s less than 300 pages?

ES: I wrote probably 1,000 pages that aren't in the book. It would have been impossible for me to write a comprehensive book both about my own experience and about nuclear weapons in general. And so, at a certain point, what rose to the surface was what was most interesting to me or most narratively compelling. 

One of the ways that I decided to organize my research was on where I was and what I was experiencing at the time: the accident of my body in space. I could write a whole book about the Nevada test site, but by framing it just around my actual trip there and threading everything through the lens of me being in that space, it helps narrow the scope a little bit and how to at least try to make sure that everything I was including was relevant and not just a Wikipedia entry. A lot of people encouraged me to bring through my own story more strongly, which was something I was kind of resistant to for a while. But once I accepted, OK, this is my journey, this helped me filter out what was most important and what is something someone else could write a book about.

RP: Can you talk more about why you initially were resistant to telling more of your story?

ES: When I started off, I was even resistant to the word memoir. I thought, “Oh, memoirs are for old, rich, famous people who've lived a life, or someone who’s had a really extraordinary or traumatic experience,” and I didn't feel like I had or was those things. I was relatively young when I started writing this book, I was in college, and I didn't have this great experience that I needed to impart to the world. So part of it was needing to reevaluate what that term means. And I've come to understand it much more broadly as seeing the world through the lens of the self. It also just felt like the topic itself is so big and important, you know, nuclear weapons and that legacy, that I didn't want to turn the lens on myself. But the fact is that we all need a way in, and so if my grandfather was my way in for me, then maybe I could be my way in for readers, I hope.

RP: The book is part family history, part history of Oak Ridge, part science explainer on the atomic bomb, and part research journal. What was the hardest part to write and why? 

ES: There were definitely parts that were hard for different reasons. I think maybe one of the hardest parts to write was the part about the environmental contamination of Oak Ridge. Not to sort of give any spoilers, but part of the reason that's so difficult is it involves specialized knowledge about how environmental exposures affect people in the environment. It's also a recent history. Going to Hiroshima was enormously emotionally charged, but the bombing was a long time ago, so there's a lot of scholarship on it. You know, there's a lot that has been kind of processed. The environmental contamination of Oak Ridge is an ongoing story: There's still contaminants in the land, and I think many people are not satisfied with the studies that have been done. And so trying to tell a story about something that is unresolved … I mean, none of this is resolved, nuclear weapons are not resolved. And that has really high stakes for the people who live there. It matters, because it affects people's health, it affects people's sense of safety, it affects property values. …

RP: Going off that, you said this is an ongoing history, and it just kind of reminded me of part of your title: Reckoning With a Hidden History. And then you have a section where you talk about trying to reckon with your whole family, and your grandfather specifically. You write, “A reckoning implies that the world may be set right with some sort of calculation; good and evil measured, justice meted, balance restored. I cannot make this equation come out. I count too many different kinds of things; my units are all mixed up.” Do you feel like you're still reckoning with this family history and the broader implications of nuclear weapons? Do you feel like there is an end to a reckoning and, if there is an end, how do you get there?

ES: I don't think the reckoning is finished. I mean, when we speak about nuclear weapons and we think about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ongoing production of nuclear weapons, the reckoning is so far from finished. It's never happened, really, at all. There's never been an apology. The 2023 G7 Summit was in Hiroshima and released a statement about nuclear weapons. They met with hibakusha [those who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] and released a statement that was really weak and made no promises about changing anything materially. When I say we haven't reckoned with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's not just about righting a historical wrong, it's about addressing the actual existential threat of nuclear weapons today, which are heightened with Ukraine and Russia, obviously, and around the world. But this statement by the G7 was sort of this feel-good, performative moment of like, “Look, we're gonna go to Hiroshima, and we're gonna talk to survivors,” and … they pointed the finger at Russia, but they don’t take account of their own nuclear arsenals or make any changes. The world now has some 9,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploy, and they equal the power of 100,000 Hiroshima bombs. 

So I don't believe that this country has ever really as a whole reckoned with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and certainly places that had a hand in those atrocities, like Oak Ridge, have kept them even more at arm's length — either not addressing the suffering at all or leaving it out entirely. I write in the book about this historical film, which is no longer played in Los Alamos, a sister city to Oak Ridge that also helped produce the bomb. The film told the entire story of the bomb; it went up to the Trinity test, which was the first test of a nuclear bomb, and it basically tells the story without saying the words for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was just like, “What? OK, you just pretend like that didn't happen. Like you just produced the bomb and the war was over and everyone was happy,” you know?” 

RP: Going back to your personal story, in the process of writing this book, do you feel your family has been more open to talking about these things and is reckoning with similar things? 

ES: I've been really touched by how supportive my family has been knowing that I'm dredging up a painful history. At times, especially in relation to writing about some of the mental illness, I wasn't sure how it would affect them. And at every step of the way, they've been really open to helping me out, even though this wasn't something that they had really spoken about before that much. There was a striking moment, which is in the book, when my aunt, Nellie, the youngest child, says to me, “I've never really talked to your dad about this,” even though they really went through it together as young people. So I do think it's opened up conversations that we hadn't had before. And I've had some gratitude from the family for creating this book, which has been really lovely. On a side note, it feels like a broader lesson: Sometimes we're afraid of reckoning with these histories, but it can actually make us feel better sometimes to look at the hard stuff. 

It sort of feels like I've learned something about the importance of telling true and complicated stories when we're talking about families and when we’re talking historically. I was also afraid to look at the broader impact of the work that my grandfather did. I was like, “That's gonna make me feel bad to face this stuff; it’s going to be awful.” And it was very emotionally difficult, but what ground do we have to stand on if we don't start in a place of truth and looking deeply at what this country has done and how our ancestors have played a part?

I think secrets and hidden and suppressed histories pose a threat. I mean, on the family level, we repeat traumas and violence. Secrets are passed down. And so if we don't figure shit out, for lack of a better term, then we perpetuate those same harms on the next generation. And I think the same can be said historically if we don't deal with histories of violence, of erasure, if we continue to erase those things, we never build anything better and more durable and more just.

RP: You write how your family was more open to talking about mental illness, but it was a pretty narrow and clinical way of talking about it. In writing this book and talking with your relatives, has there been a change in the way that they talk about mental illness?

ES: People in my family have been more open to hearing some of this stuff than I expected. I've had some pretty moving conversations with my dad. I got my grandfather's mental health files from the local Oak Ridge clinic. My dad is a doctor, and he helped me kind of sort through them and understand some of what I was seeing, which was, of course, very emotional for him. And so I think for the first time, he was kind of confronting it. He knew his dad had these struggles, he had experienced them but I think maybe had relegated them to more of a realm of, he didn't have the right medication; once you got the right medication, like he sorted it out, you know, and that it was all kind of a brain chemistry thing. Whereas when you read these files, the suffering, the ups and downs, the cycling through different phases, it's just a story that's about much more than medication, you know. And I've even actually heard from a number of people like cousins who are more distantly related to me who are finding me online and writing to me about how meaningful it is for them to encounter their own family history in this way and learn something about their family and about George's family and the traumas that were passed down from his parents. So I do hope that it gives space for people to think and talk about these kinds of stories in their own families.

RP: Do you have any advice for younger writers thinking about writing a very comprehensive family history?

ES: I would say follow your gut and follow your curiosity. And if you're interested in research, do it widely and voraciously. Read and go places, if you can; interview people, try to put it together. Don't worry about getting it all right, or consuming everything, because you can't. But just grab everything you can and start putting it on paper. Don't let some idea of some perfect, comprehensive, perfectly planned and organized story stop you from getting started.

RP: How important was it to you to be able to go to Los Alamos, as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

ES: Incredibly important. I think there's no replacement for in-person research. I could have read 100 books about Hiroshima; there are also lots of books about the Nevada test site. What happens when you go there is, people surprise you. You see things that nobody would have thought to write about.

And this comes back to the question that you asked about memoir. There's something valuable about what's filtered through the self. And I think objectivity is a lie. Even the news is not objective, because an editor picks what we cover and who we talk to. And so to me, filtering through the lens of the self is a way of being more transparent and maybe more truthful. So I don't pretend to be any kind of objective observer that doesn't have my own biases, questions, curiosities, preferences, agendas. But at least, if I am upfront about that, maybe it's honest. Going into a place, that's the only way that I can access it directly, that I can get closest to the truth of something — filtered through, of course, my own lens. And it's just amazing. You get surprised by people you see. 

RP: Has all of this research brought up new anxieties about the future of nuclear weapons? 

ES: I tend to be a person who's very anxious about the future anyway. So between climate change, nuclear weapons, and, now, AI, I have a big sense of doom. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a group that was founded by former Manhattan Project scientists after the war to help publicize in accessible ways the threat of nuclear weapons, and every year they release the time on the Doomsday Clock, which is their measurement of how close we are to nuclear midnight: the annihilation of the world. They now take into account other existential threats, such as climate change and disruptive technologies. And I believe now we're 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest it's ever been, even at the height of the Cold War. So, yes, I'm very scared of all those things. 

If I find hope, it's in these big activist movements, like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. They have gotten a huge amount of momentum in the UN, and they have the international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It has not been signed by, of course, any of the nuclear powers, but a lot of other countries in the world have signed on to it. And so there is significant political momentum in the world toward abolishing nuclear weapons. But when I think about hope, I think the reason we can't give up is because [atomic bomb] survivors are still fighting to abolish nuclear weapons. And if they can do it, we have to support them.