After publishing Carrie Soto Is Back in 2022—her novel about a star female tennis player in the 1990s—author Taylor Jenkins Reid announced she was taking a break. Five of her books in the past six years had made the New York Times best seller list. One of them, Daisy Jones and the Six, was about to become a smash-hit Amazon Prime show starring Riley Keough. Another, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, just sold to Netflix. It made sense that she might need a rest.
But that’s not why she did it.
Instead, she needed a reset. Most of her books had centered around nuanced famous women in California and the tension between their public and private lives. They were great stories. But she had done those stories. Her next one? She wanted it to be something she’d never done before.
Now—after two years out of the spotlight—she’s talking about her literal next chapter: Atmosphere, a high-stakes romance between two NASA astronauts in the 1980s. “I wanted to tell a grand, epic love story,” Jenkins Reid says.
The main character in Atmosphere is Joan Goodwin, a female astronomer who works in NASA’s Houston Mission Control Center. Joan is CapCom—or, the astronaut on earth who communicates with the astronauts aboard NASA’s shuttles. One launch sees her love interest (whom Jenkins Reid is mum about) sent up into space. Suddenly, something goes wrong with the rocket … and Joan has to do her job amid a global crisis all while grappling with the potential loss of the person she cares about most. “I just kept thinking of what it would be like for her to be down on the ground when one of the people that she loves is up there in space—her having to talk through how to manage this monumental disaster, while she knows that the person she loves may not come home,” Jenkins Reid says. “I wanted so badly to tell a story that was life or death, where the stakes were so immediate—and we understood that it might not always go the way that we want it to go. There’s something beautiful to be found in this heightened moment.”