Memoir recalls hometown in trouble
From an Atomic Town
PublicAffairs, 288 pp., $24
This memoir isn't exactly sure what it wants to be. Kelly McMasters's book is a coming-of-age tale about an only child growing up in working-class Shirley, Long Island. It's also an account of Shirley's unusually high incidence of cancer, possibly triggered by the town's drinking water which was contaminated by radiation and nuclear waste from nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory. In this two-pronged narrative, we get stories about young McMasters's love for Shirley's close-knit, ethnically diverse community interwoven with the townspeople's response to a growing public-health crisis.
McMasters offers a mixture of Jonathan Harr's "A Civil Action," the 1995 bestseller about Woburn's contaminated water supply and its difficult lawsuit, and her own stories of playing in the woods with her group of Shirley girlfriends. As an only child (born in 1976) who moved to Shirley at age 5, McMasters found a home: "Any time I wanted to be part of a bigger family, I just walked out the front door and picked a direction." McMasters tells us how her mom and dad met; she also traces the history of Shirley, which was founded by a former vaudeville musician.
McMasters wants to communicate a sense of Shirley's natural beauty, but these passages are undermined by the reader's knowledge that potentially deadly chemicals are being emitted from nearby Brookhaven. McMasters's narrative can sometimes be morbid, as when she offers a long litany of Shirley's non-cancer-related tragedies: "Anthony drowned in his parents' pool . . . Angel died of AIDS. Shannon caught meningitis . . . Joey's mother died after she had an aneurysm, and a year later Joey himself died of a heart attack . . . Ralph killed his mother-in-law and burned his wife's family house down."
Additionally, McMasters explores the history of the Brookhaven National Lab, and its devastating impact on Shirley's health: "Radioactive water and chemicals entered the soil, surface water, and ground water. The only problem was, no one outside [Brookhaven's] gates knew about it." McMasters's childhood innocence ends when her father's best friend, who works at Brookhaven, is diagnosed with a brain tumor and later dies. It's the first of several premature deaths among McMasters's friends and neighbors.
One Shirley street bordering the Brookhaven National Lab, McMasters tells us, is nicknamed "Death Row" because "so many of the people living there were sick with cancer." McMasters interviews many of the town's activists who begin demanding action from the government. She also focuses on celebrities who have helped bring attention to Shirley's plight, including actor Alec Baldwin and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour. McMasters herself lived in fear of contaminated water, which "had me shortening my showers and staring suspiciously at the glass of water next to my plate at dinner."
Some of the cancer-stricken Shirley residents eventually filed a billion-dollar class action lawsuit against Brookhaven National Lab. McMasters mentions that Jan Schlichtmann, who helped win a legal victory for the Woburn plaintiffs, was helping the Shirley plaintiffs too. The Shirley case has been "dragging on in court for more than ten years," McMasters tells us, and Brookhaven National Lab remains open.
The portion of McMasters's story dealing with Shirley's public-health crisis may have been better handled by an investigative reporter or someone not so intimately connected with the town. Readers may be left wanting more details about the decisions and actions coming from inside the government-run laboratory. As for McMasters's personal journey from Shirley to Vassar College to marriage, it's told well enough, but may not sustain a reader's interest throughout. "Welcome to Shirley" is a book that's ultimately still looking for a focus, a stronger idea of what it wants to be.
Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester. 