I recently picked up Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new release, Atmosphere (released on June 3rd 2025), and read it in two afternoons. Reid is known for her literary historical fiction with prominent romantic subplots, and her two most recognizable and highly-regarded titles are The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six (which was made into a television mini series). I haven’t read her work before, but I’d seen that her historical settings are generally well-researched and her romances tend toward the sapphic. What sold me on Atmosphere, though, was how uniquely targeted it was to me specifically, almost as if by design. It is about a woman named Joan who is an astronomy professor at Rice University in Houston, who joins the NASA shuttle program in the 1980s and (of course) falls in love with a fellow women astronaut candidate named Vanessa.
Considering that I am a queer woman who lives in Houston, have (briefly) worked on the Rice University campus, was once long-ago a Physics major in college (closely related to astronomy) and I am a massive NASA nerd who has visited Space Center Houston on many occasions… well, this book was basically written FOR ME.
Atmosphere is told primarily from the perspective of astronomer Joan Goodwin, a brilliant accomplished woman who, in addition to her work, takes care of her sister, Barbara, and her niece, Frances (who would suffer from serious neglect without Joan’s presence). Unlike Barbara, who has spent her life flitting from man to man and getting herself into trouble, Joan is serious, self-controlled, and never shown the slightest interest in romance. She doesn’t even particularly like kissing. She has watched her mother’s personality subsumed by her father’s—even despite the fact that they genuinely love each other—and vowed never to let that happen to her. Instead, she devotes her life to her love for astronomy and pursuit of knowledge.
When, in 1980, NASA opens astronaut candidate applications to women for the first time, Joan, who has spent her life dreaming of the stars and believing she would never be able to reach them, leaps at the opportunity. She finds herself among a small group of women accepted into the program. Over the course of two years of training and preparation with her candidate cohort, she befriends many fellow astronauts, and finds herself falling inexorably in love with one, Vanessa Ford, a mechanical engineer and pilot. For the first time in her life, Joan understands what all the fuss is about. However, the two women must be enormously careful, for this is the 1980s, and anything labeled “sexually deviant” could get them both fired from the program.
The novel is told out of sequence. The first chapter opens in 1984, as Vanessa takes her first shuttle flight while Joan works in Mission Control, having already experienced her first flight mission a couple months before. The chapter ends just as an emergency situation on the shuttle places Vanessa and the rest of the crew in serious danger. The novel than jumps back to 1980, when Joan first learns about the new application process. From there, chapters jump back and forth between Joan’s experiences from 1980 through 1983, (as she joins the program, completes her training, and falls in love with Vanessa), and the unfolding catastrophe on the shuttle in 1984 which finds Joan having to talk her lover through a potentially deadly situation without revealing the depth of her feelings to the rest of Mission Control.
The research details of the novel are impeccable. I recognized the locations mentioned around the greater Houston area with an amusing and disorienting sensation (I do not often see books talking about my own neighborhoods). And the details about the NASA shuttle program, the training, the operations in Mission Control, the design of the shuttle and equipment, were all accurate (at least to my amateur enthusiast’s eyes) and helped ground the love story in its time and place. The love story itself unfolds in a slow, careful way that felt organic and lovely. And the character of Joan was complex and real. Even more than her relationship with Vanessa, what sang to me the most was her relationship with her sister and her niece, which grows increasingly fraught as the story progresses. Those moments in particular felt real and important and painful to me. By the time the novel reaches its emotional payout in the end, it feels earned.
This book hit me with surprising force a few different ways. For one thing, I see an uncomfortable amount of myself in Joan. In her relationship with Barbara, the way she bites her tongue to keep the peace and allows her (selfish, manipulative, narcissistic) sister to run roughshod over her life. I too have done that with family far more often than I would like to admit. I also see myself in her fear of inadequacy, in her work, among her peers, and especially within romantic entanglements. She has a hard time believe she’s even allowed to want these things, let alone have them and be good at them. I get that feeling. These are all feelings that I think the book wants people to feel, to identify with, to absorb. And I absolutely did. So job well done.
Somewhat embarrassingly, one of the aspects of the novel the hit me the fastest and the hardest was an element that is probably pretty minor to the average person. The thing that got me crying only 22-23 pages in. The thing that kept me crying for a good chunk of the book. It was the moment Joan got the call that she had been accepted into NASA to begin with. I had to put the book down. I started to sob. I had to talk to my best friend so he could help me calm down.
You see, I wanted to be an astronaut. I know, most children wanted to be an astronaut at some point in their lives. But for me it was a serious goal for a time. The first three years of my undergraduate degree, I was a physics major. I had a plan. I was going to get my physics degree, join the Navy science program, and work my way into NASA. But that didn’t happen. I ended up getting a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Literature, and taught for nearly ten years, and got most of my way through a PhD as well. There were a lot of reasons for that that I won’t dig into here. No one cares about hearing my entire life story, and it’s all rather tangled together.
Suffice to say that despite my love for literature, I look back and regret the decision not to pursue that path to this day. There are times in your life when you stand at a fork in the path, with multiple options. No option is wrong or right, just different, each equally valid in some way, representing some aspect of your personality or your ambition. But each option requires closing down the others forever, no going back and trying again. I made a decision. I often fear it was the wrong one. To this day, I cry every time I watch Apollo 13, or a space documentary, or visit Space Center Houston. And when I read the sentence in Atmosphere, on page 23 when Joan first learns she has been accepted into the training program, I burst into violent sobs. Such is life, I suppose, that we all must live with our choices and swallow our regrets. This novel just happened to stab right at the heart of one of mine.
Atmosphere is not only about two women falling in love, or about the trials and tribulations of the space program. It is about the unfairness of a society that continually and remorselessly dismisses at women, consigning them to the background and scoffing at their ambitions and accomplishments. It is about the long and painful struggle of every woman who has had to kick and scratch and fight to claim a place among men that she has rightfully earned and deserves. It is also about the unfairness and cruelty of a society that forces queer people to hide who they truly are and deny the people they love for the sake of safety. And it is about importance of love and family and true belonging, even if that family ends up not looking like the traditional, idyllic image in a magazine. And its also about the smallness of people and the bigness of the universe, and interconnectedness that encompasses everyone so that even the smallest person’s value rivals that of the whole universe. It’s genuinely, a really beautiful, empathetic, hopeful book.
Amanda Haimoto Rudd 