In The Sound of a Thousand Stars, Rachel Robbins tells the story of the birth of the nuclear age—the scientists who populate the secret town where the work happened, their relationships, drinking, and families. She captures Oppenheimer’s ever-looming presence and the creation of his legacy as the father of the Atomic bomb, the science and thinking required to create this terribly devastating tear in the fabric of history, the anxiety around successfully implementing the Trinity test, and the guilt the scientists feel as they come to understand what they’re working on.
It’s also her grandparent’s story of Los Alamos—a love story complicated by fear, war, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. In writing this powerful, tragic, history-defining story, she does something truly amazing—she makes it sing. What Robbins doesn’t do is shy away from or minimize the horror of America’s complicated relationship with race and oppression. Nor does she do so in this conversation. America remains forever mired in these horrors, and while art can offer us a salve, it’s most valuable when it serves to illuminate that which confounds us and offers understanding. That Robbins achieves this is a triumph. That she also offers us a beautifully crafted book reflective of the person who wrote it—curious, passionate, empathic—is a tribute to the people she’s writing about and for.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Ben Tanzer
Let’s begin with what the title means to you—The Sound of a Thousand Stars—what the book is about and what you want readers to experience as they read the book.
Rachel Robbins
My working title was actually “Enola Spelled Backwards,” in reference to the Enola Gay. I thought it was fascinating that the aircraft captain, Paul Tibbetts, named the plane that dropped the atomic bomb after his mother, who in turn was named after the book Enola; or, Her Fatal Mistake by Mary Young Ridenbaugh. I’m fascinated by the implications of Enola spelled backwards—which is why Haruki’s storyline runs in reverse. Because what if we start at the end instead of the beginning? Could history have worked out differently?
I loved the title because it was a nod to Fred J. Olivi’s famous words on the evening news after the bombing of Nagasaki: “Suddenly, the light of a thousand suns illuminated the cockpit.” I also loved the reference to numbers. Caleb’s character was inspired directly by my numerate grandfather’s lived experiences in Los Alamos. It’s also a paradox since there’s no sound in outer space, so stars don’t make noise. But that’s the whole point of the Oppenheimer narrative, right? The story of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the desire to build a man-made sun here on earth. It speaks to that human curiosity, not of whether we should, but whether we can.
If there’s one thing I want my readers to experience, it’s being suspended in that incredible moment—the uncertainty on the eve of the Trinity test. They were afraid the hydrogen in the sea and the nitrogen in the air would ignite. It could have been the end of the world. But if they did nothing, Hitler would win. So, they kissed their children goodbye and stayed up all night watching the sky, waiting for the storm to pass. The sound of that blast, which came a full minute and a half after the visual fireworks of the Trinity test, was a noise no one had ever heard on Earth before.
Ben Tanzer
This is a book that involves a lot of research in a variety of areas. The story is based on your own family—something I believe was somewhat hidden from you. There’s the actual science happening on the pages, as well as the hidden city the government built to facilitate the research. I’d like to hear more about how you went about this research.
Rachel Robbins
My grandmother published a book of her letters titled Los Alamos Experience. She spoke about it publicly, always promoting a peaceful vision for the future. She was very proud that her book was the first on Los Alamos ever to be translated into Japanese. So, they weren’t exactly hiding it, but they certainly never spoke about it in their private lives. There was an invisible wall there. We were afraid to upset them. And on their part, there was that element of trying to protect your kids. Anyway, I started writing this book on the plane home from my grandfather’s funeral. I was trying to understand a world without him in it. Then, I spent a lot of time trying to get inside my grandfather’s head by sorting through my grandmother’s archival documents.
My grandfather was much more tight-lipped. He left almost no trace of his journey. I interviewed family members and my grandparents’ still-living friends who have since passed away, trying to get at the truth. It was fascinating because everyone disagreed about who my grandparents were. They all remembered them differently. Nonfiction is an impossible venture since truth has so many iterations. There’s that saying that nonfiction is about facts, and fiction is about truth. So, I turned to fiction to get at the heart of it. But at its core, it’s a love story because my grandparents were married for sixty-seven years. And I was deeply impacted by watching my grandfather unravel when my grandmother died, and he had to wait three years to join her.
Ben Tanzer
I’d also like you to take another beat on what it feels like to write a story about your family—a story that is both grand in terms of the topic and more quotidian as well, the moment-to-moment actions of what it looks like to fall in love.
Rachel Robbins
That’s exactly what I was trying to navigate! My grandmother’s letters home were entirely quotidian. She wrote about wrestling with the mangle to iron her clothes, taking the dog to the vet, and sweeping soot and sand from the floor, all behind this veil of secrecy. And there is so much value to those stories since they are a slice of the pie of what daily life was like on the project. But I also needed to let my grandparents loose on the page as fictional characters to see what would happen. My grandmother morphed into this trailblazing woman scientist (they were always called women scientists because scientists were presumed to be male). Alice’s character was, of course, inspired by real figures like Elda Anderson, Jane Hamilton Hall, and Maria Goeppert Mayer. But her heart is derived from my grandmother because she was larger than life to me. And my grandfather was so proud of my grandmother. He stood quietly by her side at every reading. That was love. And I wanted to get inside it to understand how it could have worked in a place like that, under so much pressure.
Ben Tanzer
The book is very Jewish in its way, which, as a fellow Jew, I say in celebration, and I wonder if you can speak to the importance of capturing what it meant to be Jewish during that time period. How did it feel to write about it in the contemporary world when anti-Semitism has been on the rise (or at least more out in the open)?
Rachel Robbins
I don’t know that it’s possible to capture what it means to be Jewish. My grandmother was never Jewish enough for my grandfather’s Orthodox parents; my mother was never Jewish enough for my father’s conservative mother; my sisters-in-law weren’t Jewish at all, and that upset my father initially. It’s still Fiddler on the Roof in 2024. I wanted to get at what that thing is that makes American Jews tick. That’s why I wanted to make the point in the book about the term Jewish American Princess (JAP), which was out of place in 1945 and didn’t actually come into use until after the war. But that term is a zeitgeist. Because JAP, which of course, doubled as a horrific slur for Japanese people, shames Jewish women in particular. It mocks them for being vapid but also for behaving in a way that is nouveau-rich, denigrating their status as immigrants. And yes, bringing this novel out in a marketplace right now that is so saturated with the discourse around Israel is especially complicated because the book predates the founding of Israel. Jewish authors are being blacklisted, and the rhetoric is triggering. But what’s happening in Gaza is also absolutely a violation of human rights, and my hope is that by getting deeper inside the psyche of the people who lived through the impossible horrors of the past, we can better understand where the ways part in the contemporary.
Ben Tanzer
Similarly, what’s it like trying to tell a story we know ends for many as triumphant and necessity and for many others as tragedy and something evil? How does the integration of the “Haruki: A Story Told Backward” chapters exist in dialogue with both these threads?
Rachel Robbins
I wanted to be very careful about appropriation, and I fully believe that this story needs to be told by people who lived it or inherited it and that we should all be educating ourselves—reading primary sources like the testimonials of Suano Tsuboi, on whom Haruki Sato is based, or the “So Tell Me . . . About Hiroshima” project, which features messages from hibakusha (the Japanese word for the atomic bomb survivors). It’s just bananas to me that Obama was the first sitting president to actually visit Hiroshima in 2016. Similarly, one of the most potent criticisms of the Oppenheimer movie was that it was a three-and-a-half-hour epic about the bomb that didn’t feature a single Japanese person. I only found out recently that one of my closest childhood friends, Rumi Okazaki, had a grandfather who had lived in Hiroshima and been sent away the week of the bombing on business, so he had survived. All those years of friendship, and we never discussed it—this direct intersection in our ancestry between her grandfather and mine. It’s so easy to just float through life with the people you love without having hard conversations, and it’s a disservice to where we came from.
Ben Tanzer
In terms of craft, your previous work is the poetry collection “In Lieu of Flowers,” it’s quite beautiful. It’s also 78 pages long, which I note, because The Sound of a Thousand Stars would feel like a triumph by any measure, yet the leap—and craft, required to create “In Lieu of Flowers” then this epic, historical, and romantic novel of several hundred plus pages, is mesmerizing to me. I’m wondering if it feels that way to you and how you even imagined making such a leap happen. I also want to note that while you’re a respected and award-winning poet, you’ve been, first and foremost, an artist, and one who takes on big, sweeping personal murals, and I’m curious how your work as an artist informs your work as a writer.
Rachel Robbins
I remember falling in love with the ethos of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I went to graduate school because there was this idea that the story informs the media. So, if the story you’re telling is a book, you write it, but if it needs to be a painting, or a film, or woven out of fiber, so be it. It was a gift to have time to just explore craft without worrying about packaging. Of course, there are repercussions, namely that someone needs to buy your work. It needs to fit on a shelf in a bookstore, and we’re thankful when it does! There’s actually a character based on my grandfather in In Lieu of Flowers. It was the story of his heartbreak when my grandmother died. So, The Sound of a Thousand Stars is still their story—I’ve just pointed the viewfinder further back into the past. Fittingly, for that working title, “Enola Spelled Backwards,” and all my chapters written in reverse order, I wrote what came last before what came first. I suppose that’s my process.
FICTION
By Rachel Robbins
Alcove Press
Published October 08, 2024
