Back before reality television, the wives of Astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs lived a strange kind of lonely fame. And now Gatecrasher is reporting that best-selling Red Leather Diary author Lily Koppel is writing a book, The Astronaut Wives Club, about the women’s unique experience in “Togetherville” where they “drank together, popped pills together, [and] consoled each other” while their husbands went into space and cavorted with “Cape Cookies” at Cape Canaveral.
The ladies felt pressure to maintain a degree of perfection as the public eye wondered at them, and were offered a total of $500,000 (and life insurance policies) to split among them for exclusive rights to their stories.
The women suffered while the men were away, but once they came home everything wasn’t suddenly peaches. Buzz Aldrin struggled with depression and alcoholism, and many of the marriages dissolved because of the toll isolation and infedility took on the relationships.
The book is due out in 2013, and there’s already movie or television buzz surrounding it. It could be drama gold.
