Taylor Jenkins Reid on going to space with ‘Atmosphere’ — and why she won’t go herself

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s newest novel, Atmosphere, is set at NASA during the 1980s — but the author herself has no interest in leaving Earth’s atmosphere.

“I’ll get asked all the time, ‘Do you want to go to space?'” she tells Entertainment Weekly. “And I’m like, ‘Do they have dramamine for space? If not, then no thank you.’ I can’t even go on a windy road. I can’t hack it. I don’t think I’m meant to be up there.”

So much so that Reid even passed on doing a Zero Gravity experience on a family trip to Las Vegas.

“I was like, ‘I need to do this for research,'” she recounts. ” And then we watched someone else do it and I was like, ‘Let’s just pretend I did it.’ Reading about the ‘vomit comet’ and the fact that it’s called that, I was like, ‘I have enough information. I’m going to be good.'”

But that doesn’t mean Jenkins isn’t fascinated with the heavens, and what the scientists at NASA have managed to achieve over the years — particularly in the late 1970s and early ’80s. That’s why the space program is at the heart of her latest novel, Atmosphere, out today.

“Partially, I’m guided by what feels like a place I want to go, and I trust that other people might want to go there too,” the author explains of choosing settings and subjects for her hit novels, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & the Six (also a Prime Video series), Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto Is Back.

Each of those novels has taken readers far and wide: the Golden Age of Hollywood, the 1970s rock scene, the surf culture and Malibu community of the 1980s, the world of professional tennis. (And each of those novels has also been tangentially related, even if only by the cameo of a single character).

“I see so much of my job as not just telling you a story, but taking you somewhere. I want to give you that way to escape,” Reid explains.

“I also find it really interesting to think about who thrives in traditionally male dominated spaces,” she continues. “So, the 1970s rock scene, that’s not a time when we’re thinking, ‘Yeah, that was an easy scene for women to be in.’ So what does that mean Daisy Jones has to have in order to succeed in it? What does Carrie Soto have to thrive in this area of sports?”

“What does Joan Goodwin have to have in order to be one of the first female astronauts to come into NASA’s astronaut corps and start to change the way NASA does things?” she adds. “I’m curious about how women handle that situation.”

Research & Development

“I keep choosing these things that I know less and less about,” Reid reflects. “So my research process becomes harder and harder. And with this one, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve hit my limit of what I am able to teach myself in a limited amount of time. I knew nothing about space. I knew nothing about NASA. I knew nothing about astronomy.”

She did find a lot of inspiration in Loren Grush’s The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts, which chronicles the experiences of NASA’s first class of astronauts to allow women recruits, which included Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, and more. In Atmosphere, it is this class (Group 8, in NASA speak) that precedes Joan’s cohort.

But Reid found her limitations increasingly frustrating when it came to her usual practice of solo research.

“The mechanics of the space shuttle were so hard to learn,” Reid explains. “I would be looking at diagrams of NASA documents that were released in the 1970s that somehow explained everything I needed to know. But when I was looking at it, I was like, ‘I don’t understand six words in this sentence.’ I bit off more than I could chew, and I had to ask for help.”

That help came in the form of Paul Dye, NASA’s longest-serving flight director, with whom Reid credits her ability to write a story that sticks within the bounds of what is scientifically possible (and engrosses the reader in its world-building).

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However, there was one major historical event that Reid wanted to avoid at any cost: the Challenger disaster. In 1986, the space shuttle broke apart only 73 seconds into its flight, killing every member of its seven-person crew.

A significant tragedy is threaded throughout Atmosphere, but the incident occurs in 1984, a full two years prior. That was entirely by design.

“With my work, a lot of comparison is earned,” Reid says of a tendency to liken Evelyn Hugo to Elizabeth Taylor or Daisy Jones to Fleetwood Mac. “But it was very important to me that no one confused this for the Challenger disaster, because I have such reverence for what happened and the loss of life there. I wanted to come up with a different inciting incident and see that through to its logical conclusion.”

“I have such respect for the lives that have been lost in the attempt to discover what is out there,” she continues. “NASA put satellites up there that have directly impacted all of our lives. They have developed technologies that have saved lives here on Earth. I have so much respect for everything that NASA does. I wanted to make sure that we pre-dated the Challenger disaster, and we stayed as far away from it as possible.”

I’m changing my major to Joan

Joan Goodwin might be Reid’s most fish-out-of-water heroine yet, not the least because Joan is a lifelong singleton who experiences her sexual awakening courtesy of one of the members of her astronaut class — former pilot and aeronautical engineer Vanessa Ford.

Though Reid has written LGBTQ+ characters before, Joan is cut from a different cloth, more unsure of herself and actively engaged in self-discovery than any of Reid’s prior characters.

“You’re not going to ask yourself a question that you’ve never heard asked before,” she says of Joan’s path to sexual discovery. “She knows that she doesn’t have romantic feelings for men. And so she knows that she is different than other women in her life, but she hasn’t been pushed or seen a reason to ask herself whether she has romantic feelings for women. There would be nothing to instigate that question.”

“Joan is one of those rare people who does see that there is an amazing, beautiful life out there that you don’t need romance or a sexual relationship in order to access,” Reid continues. “She’s okay when we meet her. She’s good. But it turns out she does misunderstand this thing about herself and watching her discover it is hopefully very rewarding. There was a good opportunity here for the reader to understand more about Joan earlier on than Joan does, to hold her hand through it as she begins to understand.”

Joan also comes to understand her relationship to space — her love of the stars and her sense of where she truly belongs.

“This is a story of Joan coming to understand herself and coming to understand that there are things that she believed about herself that are not true,” notes Reid. “How is she going to change? How are her dreams going to change? How is her idea of a quality life going to change over the course of the book? Joan doesn’t get everything that she’s hoping for, but she has a life philosophy that is going to see her through it.”

Another thing that’s unique to Joan? Motherhood…or a version of it. Most of Reid’s heroines are childless by choice. Joan, however, is a surrogate mother to her niece Frances — the other significant relationship she shares in the novel.

“I wanted to give Joan a very strong sense of meaning on Earth, and an investment in the future,” says Reid. “I didn’t think it was realistic that Joan would have her own child, based on her life experience up until she gets into the astronaut corps. Joan is an incredible aunt, and she has a real maternal instinct that, again, she didn’t know about herself. Frances presents Joan an opportunity to have to do the hard thing and show up for somebody.”

There’s that — and the fact that Reid wanted to include an experience very personal to her.

“I valued the opportunity to indulge a bit in writing about how wonderful and magical it can feel to watch a child grow up and discover themselves,” she says. “I have so many feelings every day about watching my own daughter grow up that it was very nice to have an outlet for those things.”

Reid is known for her bittersweet endings. Ones that feel true to life where grief and loss commingle with joy, love, and intimacy. Atmosphere is no different, though Reid admits that under different circumstances, she might not even end her books as happily as she generally does.

“I am writing for you,” she concludes. “There are certain things where if I were writing for me, I might leave you hanging. But I think you need to know what Joan’s future looks like. Hopefully, I’ve given you enough information that you can imagine how she’s going to handle this going forward, and whether she’s going to be okay.”

Whether Joan is okay or not, odds are that readers won’t be. That’s the beautiful cost of reading one of Reid’s stories — one fans are more than willing to pay.