Jennifer McMahon

I think we all have a kind of dark side, and that's what keeps life - and characters - interesting. That's one of the things that I'm drawn to write about again and again, the secrets we keep and how they shape us.

I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'

It seemed to me that NASA, especially Goddard, was the place where I could carry out the dreams that I had, which were to push forward an experiment that would measure the big bang radiation better than anyone had ever tried before. Therefore, it seemed like the perfect place to go.