📚 A Bookish Chat with 'An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's Life' Shirley Streshinsky & Patricia Klaus | Author Interview | #AuthorInterview #BlogTour #Interview

Today we welcome Shirley Streshinsky & Patricia Klaus to The Writer's Life e-Magazine! Streshinsky and Klaus are the authors of the nonfiction historical novel, An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's Life. This interview is part of their An Atomic Love Story Blog Tour by Pump Up Your Book. Enjoy!

Shirley Streshinsky is a critically acclaimed author of three works of nonfiction and four historical novels. As a journalist and travel essayist, she has written extensively for a wide range of national magazines such as Glamour, Preservation, American Heritage, The American Scholar, and Conde Nast Traveler. She is the recipient of the Society of Magazine Writers' Award for Excellence and the National Council for the Advancement of Education Writing award, and was cited by The Educational Press Association of America for "superlative achievement in features." Her travel essays have been a feature on National Public Radio. She was married to the late photojournalist Ted Streshinsky and lives in Kensington (Berkeley), California.

Patricia Klaus is an independent scholar who attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, and then Stanford University where she earned a Ph.D. in Modern British History. She taught twentieth-century British history at Yale University, was a visiting lecturer at the University of Virginia and Stanford, and has written a number of historical articles. Her particular interests are women in nineteenth and twentieth century England as well as the study of war and literature, which made working on a book about the remarkable women of the Atomic Age especially appealing.

How did you come up with the idea to write your book, An Atomic Love Story: the Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer’s life?

You could say the idea came in a flash—on the day in August of 1945 when the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, both ending a war and changing the world forever. If you grew up in the years following WWII, which both of us did, you understood how much Robert Oppenheimer symbolized the new atomic era the world faced. As a journalist and a historian, and as longtime friends, we finally committed to spending the time it would take to make a different sort of biography—told through the women in his life.

How hard was it to write a book like this?

Atomic Love Story required mountains of research. We spent a summers in Washington D.C. at the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Los Alamos, and Perro Caliente in the Sangre de Cristos Mountains. Interviews were perhaps most revealing; Kitty’s second husband was not a drug addict as Kitty alleged but a music professor and a devoted family man in his second marriage,

In your research did you find out anything odd or unusual about Robert Oppenheimer?

All kinds of things! He is remembered now as (to quote several people who knew him well) “the most brilliantly endowed intellectual of anybody I’ve ever known . . . incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits . . . a superiority but great charm” and “his voice, his manners, made people fall in love with him” and even “there was just an aura about him…” All agreed that he remained an enigma. In fact, Oppenheimer had a particularly long and troubled adolescence, once even locking his mother in a hotel room bathroom during a European holiday. And there remains the puzzling case of the “poison apple” Oppenheimer said he had left on the desk of his tutor at Cambridge. There were enough problems to turn his wealthy and doting parents to the emerging science of psychiatry for answers to their son’s erratic behavior.

What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

That Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty Puening emigrated from Germany at the age of three. One of her cousins was Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, Supreme Commander of Germany’s Armed Forces, who was found guilty at the Nuremberg Trails and hanged as a war criminal in 1946. While Oppenheimer’s Communist connections were a source of concern, his ties by marriage to Nazis were not.

Is there a message you are trying to get across with your book or is it just for reading satisfaction?

A message, oh yes. The title of the book may suggest romance, but it is in truth a biography of the man J. Robert Oppenheimer from the point of view of the women he loved, their families and their friends during a particularly critical slice of American history. One of the early reviewers of this book gets it right: when she says: “We tend to forget our own history and suffer for it. This book offers a good look at the fears and accomplishments of American society and science in the century that brought us world wars, fascism and communism and the rising importance of physics and psychology.”

Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, An Atomic Love Story unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the 20th century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with the young Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history. His first and most intense love was for Jean Tatlock, though he married the tempestuous Kitty Harrison—both were members of the Communist Party—and was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with the brilliant Ruth Sherman Tolman, ten years his senior and the wife of another celebrated physicist. Although each were connected through their relationship to Oppenheimer, their experiences reflect important changes in the lives of American women in the 20th century: the conflict between career and marriage; the need for a woman to define herself independently; experimentation with sexuality; and the growth of career opportunities.

Beautifully written and superbly researched through a rich collection of firsthand accounts, this intimate portrait shares the tragedies, betrayals, and romances of an alluring man and three bold women, revealing how they pushed to the very forefront of social and cultural changes in a fascinating, volatile era.

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