Catch The Smallest Lights In The Universe: A Memoir By Sara Seager Expressed As Print

book was so interesting and so compelling that I read it in one sitting staying up past my bedtime! She observes like a scientist, writes like a literature professor and keeps it real like someone with autism.
The result is such an unexpected delight, The Year of Womenin which I'm devotingto reading female authors onlyhas taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel, As part of my research, I wanted to read about a contemporary woman in the maledominated field of astronomy, A compelling story would have to come from that, The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir is by Sara Seager, exoplanet hunter and MIT professor who among her professional honors has been profiled by the New York Times with the headline "The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth.
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I was hesitant because the book published indeals with grief and Dr, Seager's recovery following the death of her husband in, I wanted to read about space exploration, not sadness or support groups, I'm so glad I did, This memoir one of the best books I've read in the year of women, Not only did Dr. Seager offer an incredible amount of detail about what an astronomer knows and what she experiences, but she's a fantastic writer, weaving the fascinating story of her professional life with the surprisingly intimate story of her love life and how she's survived in both.


I can trace my love, too, Why instead of horses, or boys, or hockey I don't know, I don't know. Maybe it's because the are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers and imperiled little sisters, Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet, windows to worlds greater than my own, Stars gave me the hope that I might one day find the right answers,

But there's more to my love than that, When I think of the I feel an almost physical pull, I don't just want to look at them, I want to know them, every last one of them, a star for every grain of sand on Earth, I want to bask in the hundreds of millions of suns that shine in the thousands of billions of skies in our galaxy alone, Stars represent more than possibility to me they are probability, On Earth the odds could seem stacked against mebut where you are changes everything, Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else, Somewhere new.

Mike called me again and again after our trip, trying to convince me to go on another adventure with him, He probably called me twice a week for the better part of a month, I rejected him exactly as often, I thought I understood what he saw in meI really was a pretty good skierand maybe a little of what he saw in us, We had found plenty to talk about on our long car ride, and we both

loved the outdoors, That was it, really. Did that warrant our spending more time together The truth was, the highest register on the humancompanionship spectrum at the time was Tolerate, and I didnt bring new people into my life unless they gave me a really good reason.


I would be studying something a large percentage of the community thought didnt exist or didnt care to know about, and doing so in a way that made the impossible seem even less likelylike trying to prove that Bigfoot exists not by finding him or even his footprints, but by seeing his breath.
How could we see the thin envelope of alien atmospheres when we couldnt even find the world themselves I was at a conference when a student from another school approached me in a whisper, asking if I wanted to talk to his adviser.
He could explain to me why the Swiss signal couldn't possibly be a planet, A professor from Harvard, my own school, radiated a similar skepticism, We would never be able to detect many exoplanets, let alone their atmospheres, I remember feeling as though people were trying to rescue me from a cult,

All the while, Mike and I continued our simple shared existence, I would go to school and get lost in space and code, I would come home to boats and piles of paper, Mike grounded my life, long stretches of brain peace, We never raised our voices at each other I think back on that time and remember the quiet, We spent our evenings and summers in the nearsilence of our canoe, making several more long trips north, and at home we lived together the way we paddled: It wasnt always easy, because in some ways we remained two people who were built to be alone, but we worked to find a natural rhythm.
We spent weeks at our respective work and weekends at our shared kind of play, We hiked and crosscountry skied and paddled our way across stretches of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, There was still something almost accidental about our connection, and the increasing seriousness of it all sometimes daunted us both, But our pauses never became breaks, Within a year, we had really started to set up camp,

“So, Sara, what do you do”

“I teach at MIT, ”

“What do you teach”

“Planetary physics, ”

“Wow. Um what”

“Im looking for planets outside our solar system, Other presumably have planets, Im looking for them. ”

“Why”

“Well, Id like to find other life in the universe, ”

“You mean aliens Youre looking for aliens”

“Scientists dont call them aliens, Other life. ”

“Right. So Aliens"

The fear at every school, palpable in the room, was that researching exoplanets was an intellectual dead end, Even among some astrophysicists, there can be such a thing as too much stargazing, A few dismissed finding exoplanets as "stamp collecting," an endless, meaningless search for new lights just so that we might name them, I couldn't convince the cynics otherwise, Despite the growing number of known exoplanetsby then aboutpeople told me that I would never be able to achieve what I said I would, We would never see enough planets in transit to reach meaningful conclusions about them, The challenges would always be too great, My breakthroughs were mirages my discoveries were flukes,

Near the oneyear anniversary of Mikes death, Melissa came over to my house, She led me into the kitchen, made sure we were alone, and told me that I had to pretend, at least, to be interested in men again, Until I started dating, until I looked at a man with the intention of putting my mouth on his, my grieving would remain incomplete, I would always be looking behind me, taking stock of what was missing, I needed to see what else was out there,

I knew what was out there, Thousands of billions of planets, orbiting hundreds of billions of,

What enthralled me about The Smallest Lights in the Universe is how Seager wove her professional and love lives into one compelling story, What surprised me is how strong a writer she is, She communicates astronomy very well and with a certain wit attached, She compares the best pictures of distant objects to the earliest video games: pixels in different shades of white, Contrary to what I thought, astronomers don't gaze through equipment and see objects in deep space, Their targets are too far away for anything we've invented yet to "see, " The workarounds are as much art as science, Much like this great book,

Sara Seager was born inin Toronto, Canada, Her father was a family doctor who went on to pioneer hair transplants for men, Her mother was a writer and poet, They divorced when Seager was young and she grew up avoiding the temper of her emotionally abusive stepfather, Diagnosed as an adult as being on the autism spectrum, Seager was socially withdrawn but gifted academically, She earned her BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto inand her PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in, Her research is focused on the discovery and analysis of exoplanets,

Her husband and father of her two sons was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and eighteen months later, in, died, With the help of a group she referred to as The Widows of Concord, Seager recovered and ultimately met an amateur astronomer at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's annual general assembly.
They married in. Dr. Seager is Professor of Planetary Science, Professor of Physics, and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, In, Time magazine named her one of themost influential people in space below is the photo they shot for the issue,



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

sitelinkCome Closer, Sara Gran
sitelinkVeronica, Mary Gaitskill
sitelinkClothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
sitelinkPizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
sitelinkMy Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
sitelink Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
sitelinkThe Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
sitelinkMiss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
sitelinkBeast in View, Margaret Millar
sitelinkLying In Wait, Liz Nugent
sitelinkAnd Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
sitelinkDesperate Characters, Paula Fox

sitelinkYou, Caroline Kepnes
sitelinkDeep Water, Patricia Highsmith
sitelinkDon't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
sitelinkYou May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
sitelinkThe Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
sitelinkWhite Teeth, Zadie Smith
sitelinkEva Luna, Isabel Allende
sitelinkSlouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
sitelinkEve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
sitelinkYou're on an Airplane: A SelfMythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
sitelinkThe Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
sitelinkFade Into You, Nikki Darling

sitelinkThe Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque.