The Astronaut Wives Club

There I was, slowly and not ungrumpily coming to terms with the fact that there weren’t going to be any more decent books about the Apollo missions. Only 12 men ever walked on the Moon, and the ones that were interested in writing autobiographies had already done so. There’d been the brilliant one-volume history of the whole project (Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon), and the personal memoir of what it meant to an ordinary kid growing up at the time (Andrew Smith’s Moondust). There were the big glossy coffee-table jobs showing every crater, and Norman Mailer’s over-written but still revealing account of being at Houston and Cape Kennedy, A Fire on the Moon. What was there possibly left to write? An in-depth study of the right jab Buzz Aldrin landed on the bloke who says the missions were faked? No, I would just have to get used to it: publishing’s relationship with Apollo was over.