Emily Strasser's debut book, "Half-Life of a Secret," begins with a photograph, one that hung in her grandparents' lake house: It's of her grandfather, George, (who died before Strasser was born) standing in front of a mushroom cloud made by a nuclear blast.
Strasser thought little of it until years later when it occurred to her that perhaps, "the world wasn't as it had appeared," for the image didn't correspond to the idyll her grandparents had built: long summer days swimming with cousins, catching sunfish and watching the "mirror-still lake" as "a heron rose like a ghost from the opposite shore, crossed the distance with steady, slow wingbeats, and landed on our dock."
And so begins this beautiful, nimble excavation of a family photograph and the fallout of its legacy.
George lived and worked as a scientist in Oak Ridge, Tenn., one of three cities secretly built to develop the atomic bomb. To make such a town, farmers were removed from the land, and before them, sharecroppers, Cherokee and others "who'd loved and lost this land."
Strasser asks of her family, her country: "What is it to love a home founded on such violence for the sake of further violence?" Strasser's main barrier is that the person she seeks to understand — George — can't speak for himself, so she turns to the evidence he left behind.
Thing is, Strasser can only locate the photograph in her memory, which she doesn't always trust. Not because she's an unreliable narrator, but because memory is impossible to pin down, and the secrets she's poking at don't want to be found. But poke she does.
Strasser — a graduate of the University of Minnesota MFA program — consults the archival and the autobiographical by querying not just memories of family and friends but newspapers, medical records and museums.
Each revelation, however, is encumbered by a nest of additional surprises, which feel like tiny bombs themselves, reminiscent of Sven Lindqvist's "A History of Bombing," which deploys a narrative structure mirroring the scattered path of a bomb's shrapnel.
