![]() ![]() ![]() The Bitter Southerner’s assistant editor, Rachel Priest, talked with author Emily Strasser about family reckonings, researching a memoir, and finding hope within the unknown future of nuclear weapons. But within those answers lay many more questions about George’s deep mental health struggles, the complexity of memory, and the reverberating impact of the atomic bomb in Tennessee and beyond. The Oak Ridge site was responsible for the enrichment of uranium during World War II and later for lithium isotope separation continuing on through the Cold War. George was a farmer’s son turned chemist who worked for more than 30 years at the Y-12 National Security Complex, beginning in 1943. Some answers were easier to find than others: Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities built as part of the Manhattan Project to produce the atomic bomb. But when a vivid memory of a photo that once hung above the space where she slept at the lake house came back to Emily when she was in college, she began a 10-year journey to find not only the photograph itself, which had been lost over the years, but to understand more about her eccentric grandfather, George Strasser, and his involvement in building the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Weekends and summers at Emily Strasser’s grandmother’s house near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were usually spent swimming in the lake, gathering with cousins, and listening to family stories told by Strasser’s aunts and uncle. ~ This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
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