The author of The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager, is a pioneering astrophysicist and a professor at MIT. She also led NASA’s Probe Study team for the Starshade project and earned a MacArthur grant. Since childhood she’s loved astronomy and the possibilities that lie beyond our own planet. She’s always been a socially awkward loner. She is on the autism spectrum but isn’t diagnosed until adulthood.
As a child, her life balanced between two extremes. Through the week she lived in a dysfunctional family that included a stepfather she called “the monster”—whose vicious mood swings kept her on tenterhooks—and an enabling mother. Sara spent weekends with her father, a physician who understood and cared for her.
As Sara moves through college, she meets her first husband—another loner—named Mike. They blend because they feel comfortable being alone together. They share the same love of sports and Canada’s wide-open spaces. They marry and have two sons. Mike assumes the stay-at-home parent role, working as an editor, to allow Sara time to search for the stars. Suddenly, he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and they are forced to deal with his impending death, chemotherapy, and preparing their sons for a life without their dad. Sara finds herself a widow and single mom at age forty and must pick up the pieces of their shattered life and learn to deal with home repairs, car repairs, and the other flotsam and jetsam Mike dealt with.
This memoir is a luminous look at how this successful professional reinvents herself after this loss. She moves from being a loner to “collecting” people who provide support for herself and her family as they adjust to live without Mike. Among these are a group of women, the Widows of Concord, who take Sara in and offer emotional support and advice on the above mentioned home repairs, dating, letting go of the lost loved one, and preparing to let a new love into her life. Along the way, Sara—like all working mothers—must learn to balance work and home life.
A lovely, deeply emotional memoir—I sniffled through parts of it—by an astrophysicist whose love for the stars provides the glue that holds her life together.
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The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir is available through:
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