Becca Babcock joins Lindsay to give a behind the scenes glimpse into her writing process and the inspirations behind her compelling and timely new novel, Some There are Fearless.
Hear how she drew inspiration from her own experiences coming-of-age in military driven Cold Lake, how she works to craft deeply human characters and immersive settings, and her approach to writing engineering in a way that makes it appealing to all readers. Plus, Lindsay and Becca dive into many of the novel's themes including the complexities of motherhood and its parallels to working with nuclear energy—volatility, managing risk, mitigating disaster, the obsessive need for control and inevitably, powerlessness.
About Some There are Fearless:
Jessica Manchaky’s life has been shaped by the threat of nuclear disaster. She’s a child when she hears news of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the disappearance of Ukrainian relatives, growing up on a northern Alberta military base during the Cold War. From that moment on, all she wants is to keep danger at bay.
But living in a household with a domineering and volatile mother and a rebellious older brother in isolated Cold Lake, Alberta, Jessica never feels fully safe. When she comes of age, she leaves her suffocating small town for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she meets her future husband and eventually becomes a nuclear engineer in charge of risk assessment and management at nuclear power plants. But even as she shields the world from nuclear disaster, she is constantly facing personal tragedies—like a strained marriage, a misogynistic workplace, and severe postpartum anxiety—that she never quite manages to predict. When her young daughter is afflicted with a mysterious and potentially deadly illness, Jessica must learn to accept that not all risk can be managed.
Beginning with the threat of the Cold War and the ripple effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and punctuated by other disasters both natural and manmade, Some There Are Fearless is an intimate and vulnerable exploration of the thin line between control and chaos from the author of the “terrific debut” (Globe and Mail) One Who Has Been Here Before.