Not quite two years ago, I received a call from what appeared to be a Houston area code. When I answered, I discovered that the caller was not in Texas, nine hundred or so miles from my home in Knoxville, but rather two hundred and fifty miles above me, orbiting Earth. The astronaut Scott Kelly was calling from the International Space Station; he had read my book about the end of the Space Shuttle era, and he wanted to talk about his own attempts to portray the personal and emotional meanings of spaceflight in a journal he was keeping during his mission. We talked a long time that day—about Russian literature, our shared love of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,” what the inside of a spacesuit smells like, and the food on the I.S.S. When his partner (now fiancée), Amiko Kauderer, and I went to dinner together soon after, we were talking to Kelly on the phone as we were seated; he had us turn him over to our server, whom he asked to surprise us with some of the foods and drinks he was missing most from Earth—ceviche, primavera pizza, fried meatballs, Chardonnay, and a Dogfish Head I.P.A.
By that point, in December, 2015, Kelly had been living aboard the I.S.S. for close to nine months. A former Navy pilot and a veteran of three previous spaceflights, he was flying a mission distinct from any attempted by NASA before—a full year in space. Before humans can hope to reach a far-off destination such as Mars, scientists must first understand the effects of long-term spaceflight on the body and mind. They already had a great deal of data about what happens to an astronaut after shorter periods of time in space, but almost none about what happens after six months. Kelly had volunteered to be their guinea pig. His muscles would atrophy, his bones would thin, his cardiovascular system would weaken, and his body would be bombarded with radiation equivalent to ten chest X-rays every day. When I first spoke with him, he could no longer remember what rain smelled like or what it felt like to be held in a chair by the force of gravity. In all, Kelly worked on nearly four hundred experiments, including a study comparing his physiology to that of his identical twin brother, the retired astronaut Mark Kelly (a study that has already yielded surprising and promising results).
In the months following that first call, Kelly told me more about his life in space—the frustration of fixing the same air purifier over and over again, the pleasures and challenges of working with crewmates from seven countries, the satisfaction of completing a difficult spacewalk, the unexpected pride of bringing a crop of zinnias back from the brink of death, the dread when an emergency call about his daughter reached the station. He also told me surprising details about his life before joining NASA, including his lifelong struggles with what he now believes was undiagnosed attention-deficit disorder.
Once Kelly returned to Earth, in March, 2016, we began working together on his memoir, “Endurance.” We spoke again shortly after its release, this past October.
M.L.D.: In the book, you write a lot about your difficulty paying attention in school. Compared with other subjects, was writing hard for you?
S.K.: Absolutely. All schoolwork was hard for me, but writing was impossible. I just didn’t have the ability to stay focussed enough to get through even a short piece of writing.
Do you remember ever enjoying writing?
No. I only remember it being a struggle.
What kind of writing did you have to do once you got to college?
I took only the minimum required English courses—two semesters of freshman English.
It was around that time that you read “The Right Stuff.”
That’s right. Reading that book gave me the motivation to become a pilot and an astronaut. I changed schools and changed my major to engineering. Learning that material was hard for me with my attention issues, but I still don’t think I could have written even a simple paper.
What kind of training in writing did you get in your career?
As a test pilot, a great deal. A big part of being a test pilot is writing a very detailed technical report on the data from each test flight—evaluations of the airplane’s flying qualities, recommendations for improvements. The hardest part of test-pilot school is not the flying but the writing.
Do you remember how you did on those reports?
I would say probably average. I never got a flunking grade. There’s an expression in the Navy: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.” That saying is really about flying an airplane against an adversary. Having a few extra knots of speed here and there is encouraged. But one thing that we were told over and over again in test-pilot school was, “You will not look at someone else’s report and write your report based on that.” They put the fear of God in us.
I became a much better writer, eventually, because of e-mail. A few decades of writing in that form taught me a lot.
What kind of writing did you do on the International Space Station?
Aside from a lot of e-mail, I kept a journal. I hadn’t done that on my previous flights, but I had the idea to write down my impressions on this one because it was an unprecedented mission and I thought I might want to write about it someday.
What was your routine?
I would write on the weekends, which is the only free time I really had. Sometimes I would write stuff down on an index card I kept, just a few words to help me remember. It was easier in the beginning, partly because when you first start a project like that you’re more motivated. I remember I wrote a passage about growing up in New Jersey, and Amiko said to me, “You know, you could write a whole book yourself.” And I said, “Well, if I could write like this every day, I could.”
Did you ever have the experience people describe of losing yourself in the writing, losing track of time—what psychologists call a flow experience?
No. It was always hard.
Since “Endurance” was released, I’ve heard you say that writing it has been the hardest thing you’ve ever done. That always gets a big laugh, because people know the other things you’ve accomplished—things like spending a year in space, commanding the Space Shuttle, and landing the F-14 Tomcat on an aircraft carrier. But I suspect you’re being at least partially serious.
There are different kinds of hard. It’s not the hard of landing an airplane on an aircraft carrier. It’s not the hard of doing a spacewalk. But writing a book is the type of project that takes a persistent focus over a long period of time, a lot of energy, a lot of work. I’m not joking when I say it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. It was pretty damn hard.
Do you feel like you came up against the same attention issues that bothered you as a kid while we were working on this book?
Absolutely. It was so challenging that I eventually got a prescription for Adderall. That helped greatly.
When you decided to seek treatment, was it because you just weren’t able to get writing done at the pace you needed to?
What I found hardest was that, in working on this book, I had to read it over and over. When I had to edit a hundred pages a day, reading really closely and editing, that was gruelling. I didn’t need the Adderall to write pages initially, but I did need help to get through the whole process.
Was that something that surprised you—that writing a book is mostly editing?
Yeah. Honestly, I thought we were done with this thing, like, five different times.
Were there other things you feel you learned about writing by doing this project?
Absolutely. I wish I could write this book now. I remember you said that to me at one point—a writer learns how to write each book by writing it. By the time you’re done, you’re great at it, but it’s too late to apply those skills.
I also learned that you don’t ever really feel like a book is finished to your satisfaction. You sort of have to abandon it and let it go out into the world. I was surprised how hard it was. And I was surprised that we wrote a really good book. It’s better than I thought it would be.
What have you written that you were most proud of?
I would say the first thing I ever wrote that I thought was an achievement was my final-exam report for test-pilot school. I flew an F-15, which I had never flown before, evaluated its flying qualities and the performance of the engines, then came back and wrote a report. It was probably an inch and a half thick. That was the first thing I wrote that I was really proud of.
I was also really proud of the part I wrote in my journal during my year in space about growing up in New Jersey and what my neighborhood was like, the flowers. I think that was the best creative writing I ever did.
What is your favorite part of “Endurance”?
The part where I’m outside the Space Station on a spacewalk and I’m disoriented. When I read that, it still gives me goosebumps.
