Ciera Horton McElroy has always been a writer. Ciera grew up in the Dr. Phillips area, where she had the quintessential Floridian childhood. She attended college in Illinois, faced the shock of the cold and snow, and met her husband. In 2017, Ciera moved to Lake Nona, where she and her husband attended the University of Central Florida (UCF) – he pursued medical school, and she pursued her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. It was during her MFA that the first draft of her novel, Atomic Family, came to be.
The concept for the story first came to Ciera when she was an undergraduate student. She was writing short stories about characters in a small southern town with a nuclear plant outside. However, she felt these characters’ stories deserved to be fleshed out. Ciera took this concept and got to writing. Sometimes, people have a hard time envisioning where novelists do their work. For Ciera, much of the writing took place in Lake Nona: at Canvas, in the Starbucks on Narcoossee, at the UCF College of Medicine’s library, in her apartment. Within three months, she had the first draft of her novel. While it got gutted in the workshop (this is what creative writers do), she persisted and revised until it was ready to be sent off to agents and editors and became her novel, Atomic Family.
Atomic Family is a literary historical fiction novel about one family whose world is affected by the Cold War. Readers follow Dean, the father, who is a nuclear scientist at a top-secret hydrogen bomb plant outside town. Readers also follow Nellie, the mother, who, along with the other disgruntled housewives, joins an anti-nuclear protest that is protesting not only nuclear war but the work that their husbands are doing. Their son, Wilson, has taken the propaganda of the Cold War literally and has been given free rein to hunt communists, as he believes he is doing. The novel tracks how this family’s lives are forever changed.
To author this novel, Ciera scoured primary sources from the era, watched movies from the ’50s and ’60s, watched propaganda short films that were shown in schools, and read books. While Atomic Family is a work of fiction, the story was inspired by Ciera’s grandfather’s work as a nuclear scientist and his research. Ciera grew up hearing stories about him and his specific area of work as a soil scientist. Soil scientists studied the way nuclear waste was disposed of. At the time, nuclear waste was simply buried. Now we know the environmental impact and can see this reflected in contaminated rivers, tributaries, soil, animals, and so on. This is very much a reality in the town where Atomic Family takes place. Plus, it serves as a metaphor.
“We’ll bury a big problem and deal with it later, even if there’s no possible solution,” Ciera says. “I ended up thinking about that in terms of the Cold War itself, in a marriage. What does it look like to bury our problems and say we will deal with them later? That, thematically, became a big question that I wanted to explore. The more I studied the Cold War, the more I felt like it was so timely. The Cold War is not necessarily constrained by a timeline of events. It is all about the psyche of disaster coming and being prepared for it at any time. That was so unsettling to me, and so eerie and so relevant to thinking through my childhood growing up during the War on Terror and school shootings as a constant threat. Those themes are still so relevant as is this pressure to be prepared for disaster at any moment, and to know what we can do to manage our anxiety and our emotional state.”
This book is different for Ciera now, as a parent, than it was when she wrote it. One of the biggest takeaways, she finds, is that, sometimes, making your child feel safe is all you can give them, and that is still important. In her book, Dean, the father, builds a fallout shelter even though it would do nothing but make his child feel safe. She comes back to this in her daily life as she tries to make her son feel safe in different situations. She hopes other parents see this, too. ‘Atomic Family‘ is ideal for fans of literary historical fiction like Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale or Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and for those who enjoy character-driven fiction. Readers can find Atomic Family online anywhere you get your books or in stores at Zepellin Books. You can find Ciera on Facebook and Instagram @cierahmcelroy, on TikTok @cierawrites and on her website at cieramcelroy.com.
