Your background as a clinical psychologist—especially your work in sexuality, fertility, and chronic illness—brings a rare depth to your characters’ emotional experiences. How did your professional life shape the themes and relationships in Fission?

Being a psychologist and the author of Fission are two sides of a circle. My parents married at ages nineteen and twenty-two and stayed together for fifty years. Their marriage was conflicted. My mother confided too much in me, her younger daughter, including complaints about their sex life. Witnessing their unhappiness was instrumental in my becoming a psychologist, including my choice to specialize in couples and sexuality. I craved the skills to fix the unfixable. Later in life, I realized I had never fully grieved for my mother. I wanted to imagine her youth. What had it been like to fall in love, get married just before Pearl Harbor, and then have an unintended pregnancy, derailing her dreams of being a concert pianist or lawyer? She was an early feminist. My father was somewhat more traditional. Doris and Rob’s marriage is the fulcrum of the novel, balancing love and disappointment. Of course as a psychologist I wanted the main characters, including the spy, David Sokol, to be as complex as I could manage. I gave Doris and Rob a somewhat happier ending than I perceived for my parents, but my family had many times of humor and closeness.

Doris's journey in Fission mirrors a kind of emotional fission—torn between duty, desire, and selfhood. What inspired her character, and how much of her story is drawn from personal or family history?

I loved the idea of fission as a metaphor for heartbreak. My publisher, Brooke Warner of SheWrites Press, wanted me to change the title. I opted to add the subtitle instead, because I had used the image of fission at three critical points in the story. Brooke is correct, however, that a title should evoke the story rather than the story being required to explain the title! Fission is a coming of age story. My mother would have been happier as a Boomer. The rigid gender roles of the 1940s and 1950s constrained her life. I followed her history closely, including her regret that she had not accepted her wealthy uncle’s offer to send her to Wellesley when she graduated high school at sixteen, and her lifelong sadness that the anatomy of her hands limited her ability to be a first-rate pianist. Doris, like my mother, is a perfectionist.

In Fission, Doris learns accounting in Oak Ridge and earns money for her family with smart stock investments. My mother, in reality, taught herself accounting when she was in her late thirties, becoming the first female comptroller of an industrial company in Illinois. However, she abhorred stocks because her family lost their money in the depression. Many of the scenes in Oak Ridge were based on family tales, but a novel must be more dramatic and structured than a memoir. The love triangle subplot is totally fictional, but provides the moral dilemma for Doris, along with the ambivalence she and Rob have about the atomic bomb. Doris’s Southern friend Betty is also a complete invention. My mother only told me that she befriended Southern women in Oak Ridge and admired their “steel magnolia” qualities. One did ask her initially, if she was really a Jew since she was blonde and did not have horns.

The setting of Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project is rich with moral complexity, secrecy, and scientific ambition. What kind of research did you do to capture that environment accurately, and did anything you discovered surprise you?

I read many nonfiction works about the Manhattan Project, including articles and books about Soviet spies. In 2019 and 2021, two were identified through Soviet archives. They had operated in Oak Ridge and returned to the Soviet Union, undetected. Both worked in the same building as my father (X-10) and like him, were young electronic engineers from Jewish immigrant families. One was a radiation safety officer and my father had an accidental gamma ray exposure. However, I have no way to find out if he knew either of them. Ann Hagedorn’s book, Sleeper Agent (2021) about the spy George Koval was an inspiration for Dave Sokol. I also explored oral histories collected by the Atomic Heritage Foundation and was helped by D. Ray Smith, the Oak Ridge city historian. I was astonished to find that Julie Coryell, the daughter of my father’s group leader, Charles Coryell, had published a lengthy volume of interviews with him, A Chemist’s Role in the Birth of Atomic Energy (2012). For the first time I understood what my father did in Oak Ridge. One new anecdote: On the day the bombing of Hiroshima was announced, my father had brought his radio from home to the lab, just to fix it. Radios were banned in the lab as potential security risks. However, he repaired the radio and everyone gathered around to hear the newscasts. Julie and I are now dear friends and are planning a trip to Oak Ridge together. Neither of us can figure out why Coryell told both my parents about the atomic bomb and plutonium the night he recruited my father. Fission includes my speculative scene of how it happened.

You’ve said that your mother discouraged you from pursuing writing unless you were as driven as Truman Capote. How did that early message shape your path, and what finally gave you the confidence to publish your debut novel now?

My mother wanted me to be financially self-supporting and was frightened when I took so many creative writing classes in college. I was not really discouraged by her. My drive to become a psychologist was strong enough to shape my career path. Now that I am retired I am grateful for the freedom to write fiction, which I have always loved. I have discovered a vast network of talented older women writers and made many new friends. I still have more insecurities as a novelist than I had as a psychologist, though. For example, History Through Fiction asked for my manuscript and then rejected it!