The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story by Lily Koppel

(Grand Central, $28)

The lives of the women on the cover of this book were “more complicated and more interesting” than their contented smiles suggest, said Margaret Quamme in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. They were the wives of America’s first seven astronauts, and when their images appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1959, they seemed to embody the era’s domestic ideal: beautiful, perfectly coiffed helpmeets ably tending to the various needs of their children and heroic husbands. Much of that was a choreographed charade, though. As Lily Koppel shows in her “pleasantly gossipy and often touching” group portrait of the dozens of women whose astronaut husbands pulled them into the national spotlight, an astronaut’s wife either stoically projected tranquil domesticity, or her husband was out of a job.

“Koppel gets at the wives’ flaws and weaknesses as well as their resilience,” said Celia McGee in the Chicago Tribune. From 1964 onward, all lived in a Houston neighborhood they called “Togethersville,” and while the media pressed for access and their husbands risked their lives and hooked up with mistresses at Cape Canaveral, many wives turned to drink or downers. Because NASA was scandal-wary, divorce or couples therapy was unthinkable, so the wives coped by rallying together. Still, many marriages crumbled after the spotlight lifted: Of the space program’s 30 original astronaut couples, all but seven eventually divorced.

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The wives themselves eventually become “difficult to keep straight,” said Curtis Sittenfeld in The Washington Post. Those seven women featured in the first Life profile “emerge with semi-distinct identities,” but by the time 1963 arrives in growing Togethersville, “I had given up on trying to remember who was who.” But Koppel chose to downplay individual stories in favor of capturing a cultural moment, and “in this she excels.” Ham loaves and false eyelashes, hot pants and Virginia Slims: Every detail is a reminder of “just how bold and innovative” the Sputnik era seemed to those living through it.