Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science (2005)

M.G. Lord's memoir provides a mostly straightforward yet affecting account of growing up in the southern California household of a rocket scientist, her father, and of the highly funded federal agency that employed him. During the '60s, her father worked for Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena and was involved, among other projects, with the Mariners Mars 69 mission. He was a decidedly minor figure among the many thousands who have made the U.S. space exploration efforts what they are on the world historical stage, but he was there, participating and contributing. As a father, not altogether surprisingly, he was abstracted and distant, even cold, absorbed in the work. This family dynamic was typical of its time and place but further exacerbated by the early death of Lord's mother from cancer. As Lord describes it, the household atmosphere grew insufferably claustrophobic after her mother's death as her father withdrew further and further into his work; eventually she left for college, a normal point of growing up that felt to her like fleeing. Her own studies and interests led her to cultural history; her first book, which was well reviewed, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, chronicled the origins and career of the well-known Mattel doll. Thus, her training and natural instincts, in combination with her life experiences, see her approaching her memoir almost as a journalist, carefully detailing a history of JPL and the significant milestones of scientific/technological history associated with it along with incidental effects of sexism, overt and covert, woven through, effectively constructing a context from which she can limn the broader outlines of her and her father's lives. In a work environment that worried as a matter of policy about letting women who were menstruating handle sensitive electronic equipment, it's almost inevitable that Lord is going to find ample opportunity for discussion of feminist issues, and how they ultimately came to shape and define not only her father, but herself as well. Lingering resentments are equally inevitable, but Lord attacks her project with clarity and balance, shuttling expertly back and forth between the personal and the institutional. She illustrates where she is coming from at every step, and one never gets the sense that anything about this is indulgent or "therapeutic," which makes it the best kind of memoir. Never cloying, always fact-filled and engaging and insightful, one comes away from it with a broader sense of an industry and a time in place in history, and most important, yet subtly so, of the person who is telling you the story.

In case it's not at the library.