The subtitle of Kelly
McMasters' Welcome To Shirley: A Memoir From An Atomic Town refers to the national nuclear
facility in close proximity to her Long Island hometown, and the horrors it
visited upon the population, but it might as well also describe her upbringing.
McMasters somehow waxes rhapsodic in this bittersweet chronicle of small-town
life and scientific irresponsibility, whose sentimentality sets it apart from similar
accounts.
The town of Shirley seemed
like a safe haven to McMasters, since her father, a golf pro and groundskeeper,
had moved them from course to course each year. By the early '80s, the
Levittown-esque development, designed to provide a second-home getaway for city
dwellers, had evolved into a tight-knit blue-collar town where streets were
blocked off for Fourth of July barbecues and kids were allowed free rein of the
neighborhood in the summer. But it also sprung up cheek-by-jowl with the
Brookhaven National Laboratory, a facility for nuclear physicists whose
advisory board had suggested it be built at least 50 miles from human
settlement. There was no mushroom cloud, no explosion, just a slow leak of radiation-polluted
water into area wells, which caused locals in Shirley and the towns nearby to
develop cancer at rates far higher than geographically probable, particularly
brain tumors, breast cancers, and acute leukemia in children. In one
unforgettable moment, the author describes asking her fourth-grade class for
money for her sick "best friend," a neighbor's father who worked at the
Brookhaven plant.
McMasters name-checks A
Civil Action
and Erin Brockovich, but the real beauty of Welcome To Shirley lies in her ability to evoke
her childhood, idyllic in every way except one. That gathering storm is never fully
obscured, but the picture she draws is so compelling that the book bumps and
skips a bit when the science of Brookhaven's toxic leaks kicks in, in the book's
second half. Likewise, accounts of other tragedies which befell residents of
the town—from a teenage girl left for dead in a marsh at the edge of town
to the crash of TWA Flight 800 in the nearby Long Island Sound—pull focus
from the central environmental disaster, which is certainly terrible enough in
scale by itself. Still, her exhaustive sifting through medical and scientific
evidence for what happened to Shirley is admirable, as is the fortitude with
which she returns to her hometown for a critical look.