Author Interview: Margaret Lazarus Dean
The author of Leaving Orbit on the language of spaceflight, waiting to write, and working with astronauts
Margaret Lazarus Dean’s Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight won the 2013 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was published in 2015. Hailed as “a joy to read” by the New York Times, the book brings NASA’s space shuttle program to life even as the program faces its dying days. Leaving Orbit is a rigorous, beautiful, endlessly moving blend of journalism, criticism, meditation, and memoir, and Dean’s love for her subject is utterly contagious. It’s impossible not to dream of space, reading these pages. It’s one of my favorite books, and I was thrilled to speak to its author about the poetry of spaceflight, what’s next — for her and for NASA — and more.
Margaret Lazarus Dean reads at Literati with Angels of Detroit author Christopher Hebert on Monday, September 26th at 7pm.
Q: In the prologue of Leaving Orbit, you consider the plaque left on the surface of the moon, which includes the phrase, We came in peace for all mankind. “Rarely is such grandiose language earned,” you write, “by such specific and deliberate action.” You then talk about your love for “the language of spaceflight: the go and the no-go, the translunar injection burn, the nod and the twang.” What was it like to try and marry this wonderful, weighted vocabulary to your own (truly beautiful) style? To balance the inevitable lure of the grandiose (we’re talking about space, after all!) with your writerly inclinations towards nuance and the need to explain your subject to a lay audience?
I think part of what draws me to this language is that it’s grander and more abstract than anything I would ever allow myself. I mean, who would write like that? (Norman Mailer, I guess). Like a lot of writers, I have learned to fear abstraction and have a real aversion to any language that announces its own themes too clearly to the reader. So when I came across this language — created by a government agency! — that made such a ballsy attempt to explain the grand significance of its own work, and did it so well, I was really moved by that. When I was trying to write about the plaque, I kept wondering, is it dumb that I love this so much? Am I the only one who wants to read this as poetry?
Q: Deep in the book, you discuss the conflict between fully inhabiting “the lived experience” versus “the burden of documenting it.” What was it like to have such tremendous, meaningful experiences — watching these shuttle launches, entering the VAB — knowing you were going to write about them? How did you balance the ongoing process of this project with the temptation to stop taking notes, sit back, and watch these longed-for moments unfold? Or is there no contradiction after all?
I thought a lot about this question during the events in the book. Specifically, I felt anxious a lot of the time that I should be taking notes, should be documenting things better, if I was going to be writing about it well. It didn’t help that for a lot of the events I went to, a press corps was there documenting things properly and professionally. I was aware that my approach was dangerously inefficient — I was just experiencing these places and events and people all day, including a lot of dialogue, and I would wait to write it all down until later. Sometimes I had to wait until the next day, which worried me because I know about the effects of sleep deprivation on memory. But I felt strongly, and still do, that writing about things while they are happening, even if it’s just jotting notes, means you are having a different experience, that you are stepping outside the actual moment. You are writing — not just the physical act of scribbling but the mental shift of sorting, judging, analyzing — while everyone else is watching a launch or talking to other people or drinking a lot of beers or what have you. Some of the things I did and learned, some of the connections I made with people, I don’t think would have happened if I had had my notebook out at the time. I also think there was some value in seeing events through to the end before trying to ascribe some meaning to them, which we are always doing when we write, even notes. I worked hard to make things as accurate as I could after the fact by doing a lot of research and by having other people who were there check my drafts for me, especially their own dialogue, multiple times.
Q: Your lovely first book, The Time It Takes to Fall, was a novel set against the backdrop of the Challenger explosion. What was it like to take on a similar subject — to ask, perhaps, some of the same eternally recurring questions — in nonfiction instead of fiction? Did your training in fiction help or hinder (or neither or both) your transition to a more journalistic approach?
It’s odd to me when I hear people say that I’ve written two books about space. It’s true, but the two projects seem so wildly different to me, it’s almost a coincidence that they are both very concerned with the space shuttle and the area around the Kennedy Space Center. It’s hard to say how my training as a fiction writer influenced my nonfiction writing — fiction is so much harder in so many ways, because the events have to both make sense and provide some kind of surprising satisfaction to the reader. Nonfiction doesn’t have to make nearly as much sense. It can be much chunkier and messier and the reader will go along with it. The biggest challenge of nonfiction for me was creating a voice for a first-person narrator who was supposed to be me. But which version of me? What do “I” sound like? That was much more challenging than writing in the voice of a character like Dolores, who I figured out pretty quickly. The only real crossover between the two books was writing about the day Challenger was lost in Leaving Orbit — I had to figure out how to write about it in a new or different way, having already explored that pretty thoroughly in The Time It Takes to Fall.
Q: “Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day,” you write. “The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history.” It’s been five years since the shuttle program ended and more than a year since Leaving Orbit was published. How are you feeling about the state of space travel now? Is there anything tempting you to write a postscript, an addendum, etc.?
Since Leaving Orbit was published, the private companies like SpaceX and Boeing have moved forward in developing new spacecraft to send cargo to the International Space Station and eventually to take astronauts there. I would say they are doing better than the pessimists had predicted in 2011 and not as well as the optimists predicted. I got some angry responses to my book’s subtitle (“Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight”), and a lot of that anger was centered around a belief that I was saying spaceflight was completely over (I wasn’t) or that I wanted it to be over (I really wasn’t). Some angry people wrote to inform me that, in case I wasn’t aware, the International Space Station was still in orbit and in fact American astronaut Scott Kelly was living there for a year. And I was like — yeah, no, I know that! I follow NASA on Twitter too! The subtlety of what I was trying to get at by using that wording “last days” was lost on some of the people I thought would appreciate my book the most, which makes me sad. Of the things that have happened since the end of the space shuttle, Scott Kelly’s year in space emerged as more significant than any of the achievements of the private companies, which has been a pleasant surprise. We are still more captivated by a human being’s experience in space than by the promise of new hardware.
Q: What’s next? In your writing life, on your reading list?
Right now I’m working on co-writing a memoir with Scott Kelly about his year in space and the experiences in his life that led up to that. Scott was one of the people who was not put off by the subtitle of Leaving Orbit, thank goodness, and he liked the book enough to ask me to write his memoir with him. It’s going to be out with Knopf in November 2017, so I’m in the thick of it right now. Toward that end, the books on my desk are: The International Space Station Owner’s Workshop Manual, Soyuz: A Universal Spacecraft, To Be a U.S. Naval Aviator, and Flying the Edge, a study of the Navy Test Pilot School.
