Emily Strasser's memoir Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History is about the work at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a secret city for 70,000 people constructed in 1942–43 as part of the Manhattan Project for developing the atomic bomb. Staff were unable to talk with each other; truth was sanitized; many did not know they were creating the bomb. 

During our discussion, UMRA’s Book Club I members agreed that Strasser’s family stories made the book meaningful. Her grandfather George Strasser was a chemist at Oak Ridge for a decade. He suffered from alcoholism and mental illness and was finally dismissed because he was “totally and permanently disabled.”

Strasser earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, where she spent time researching and writing Half-Life, her first book, published in 2023 by University Press of Kentucky.

Oakridge is still heavily contaminated with uranium and other toxic substances. A half-million pounds of mercury flowed into nearby waters and still pollute streams and lakes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hopes the site will be cleaned up by 2047.    

Strasser tells about suppression of the truth. Environmental samples taken by the United States Geological Survey were confiscated. A doctor who raised issues about various cancers was persecuted; his hospital cut his phone lines. Around 15,000 people died at Oak Ridge. 

Many injustices

Our members cited many injustices—to the small farmers displaced to create the city and to the nearly 7,000 African Americans who worked in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project—and the immorality of the United States dropping atomic bombs on Japan. 

Strasser’s visit to Hiroshima and her conversations with Hibakusha—survivors of the bombs dropped on Japan—helped us feel the horror of what our country did to innocent people. I agreed with Strasser's statement that at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, “The bomb was glorified while the victims were erased.” In the movie Oppenheimer, very little was said about the horrific impact of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Strasser concludes: “There is no knowing, no certainty in a place with such widespread and complex contaminations as Oak Ridge, in a place that has been steeped for years in an oppressive culture of secrecy. … I believe this land, these people, were hurt. It matters that fish and other species still carry elevated concentrations of mercury, that radioactive materials still trickle into the streams and rivers. What is the half-life of a secret?”

Strasser’s work has also appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and more. In 2024, she received the Reed Prize in Environmental Writing (book award) from the Southern Environmental Law Center. Strasser teaches creative nonfiction, journalism, and writing about climate change at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

—Judy Helgen, UMRA Book Club I