Megan Cummins, editor of the online magazine Public Books and author of the short story collection “If The Body Allows It,” expanded her short story “Aerosol” into her debut novel, “Atomic Hearts,” a story about family and forgiveness through the lens of Gertie, a protagonist who is a storyteller herself. The novel moves between Gertie’s adolescence and adulthood, a coming-of-age novel that investigates the power of storytelling in survival and forgiveness. Cummins speaks at Harvard Book Store on Tuesday. We spoke with her ahead of the event about the book, what she took away from writing it, and what she hopes it will mean to readers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the idea for your novel come from?
I had been thinking of a moment when I was a teenager when some friends and I had built a bonfire. There was, wedged in one of the cinderblocks that we used to create the fire pit, an aerosol can that, as the fire got hot, exploded. Thankfully no one was hurt, but that moment lingered with me as something that bad could have very easily happened to a teenager just having fun and not paying attention. I ended up writing a short story surrounding that moment, but kept thinking of the character and what that moment might incite. I felt like there was more there. I kept writing and expanded the story of Gertie, the main character in the book, and it becomes a story about her parents and her family and how she is trying to manage things that maybe a teenager shouldn’t have to manage when it comes to her family.
How difficult was it to go from writing short stories to writing a novel?
I had tried to write a novel in the early 2010s that didn’t pan out. The idea now to continue “Aerosol,” to expand that into a novel, felt almost like a baby step – almost like a little bit of a mental trick that made it seem not quite so daunting. When I work on a short story, the first draft will normally take me a month, and then I revise and it feels very self-contained. For the novel, I was just in the thick of it for years. But once I felt like I was in the middle of it, I began to get a lot more comfortable, because I could see the end and I knew where it was going. It felt a little easier to sit down and work on this thing that I had grown very intimately familiar with.
What were some of the biggest influences on “Atomic Hearts”?
Other books that had writers as protagonists. I like to think of that category maybe a little more broadly – not just writers, but also storytellers. I was thinking of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the idea that the character in that book, June Offred, we find out later she’s recording her story, but there’s a lot of references in that book to storytelling. I was really influenced by Ian McEwan’s “Atonement”; in some ways my book could not be more different than a historical novel about World War II, but I was very influenced by its metafictional aspects. and also by the poetry of Laura Kasischke, a beautiful writer. I often read her poetry as I was working on this, and a line from one of her poems is the epigraph of my book.
Is there anything that you learned about yourself through writing “Atomic Hearts,” especially because the idea came from a memory in your own life?
Gertie has a complicated relationship with her father, who struggles with opioid addiction. She has a complicated relationship with her mother – when Gertie is younger, her mother is experiencing something very different from her when their family falls apart, even though the source of their feelings are the same. You might think you’re experiencing the same things because the root cause or whatever the situation is might be the same, but any two people will be experiencing something different. I learned a good lesson in taking a step back from assuming you know how someone else feels about a situation.
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
I hope readers will connect with Gertie. She is not a perfect character – there’s no perfect person in this book. Even though there are times the book is quite heavy, I ultimately wanted it to be a story of love and redemption and forgiveness, and so I hope that readers will ultimately feel the heartwarming aspect of the book, and I hope they feel that the heartfelt moments will overpower some of the darker ones. And I hope that they connect with the book’s sense of humor, and the idea that no one is beyond forgiveness.
Megan Cummins reads from “Atomic Hearts” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free. Author Julian Zabalbeascoa joins.
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