The Astronaut Wives Club

Title: The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story
Author: Lily Koppel
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: History, Biography
Nutshell: The stories of the women whose husbands went into space.

So, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a big space dork. I know way more than the average person my age about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. I wrote papers about the Saturn V rocket in school. So this book was more or less in my area of interest.

This is a pretty easy book. You don't have to know much about the early space program to understand the book, which is mainly about the wives of the astronauts and what they had to deal with. These were mostly all military wives, and the wives of test pilots to boot, so they were already used to quite a bit of pressure before their husbands were ever chosen to go into space. But once the men became astronauts, they also became famous, and women started coming out of the woodwork, adding a whole new stress to their lives and marriages. NASA was also a difficult organization to work for in the 60s, for both the astronauts and the "astrowives." This is basically a story of those issues and problems, and how the women handled them.

Some wives are better profiled than others. Obviously, the Mercury wives get the longest stories, since they were around first. Women like Annie Glenn, Betty Grissom, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter are characters in their own right and are duly focused on. Some of the later wives get much shorter shrift. Names become hard to remember, although there are plenty of photos of the astronauts and their wives and families for reference, which help. 

I suppose I wanted this book to be a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The life of an astronaut's wife wasn't all that exciting. It was a life of waiting and consistently being left behind. And occasional press crawling through the windows. I can't imagine what it must have been like, but this book does give a fair idea. But it did take me a while to read because it wasn't really gripping, but you can't expect that from this kind of history. If you have some spare time and are interested in women's history or the little-known history of the early space program, this is an interesting read.