The Astronaut Wives Club: Lily Koppel tells new tales of incredible friendships

Shambhala Sun readers will be familiar with Lily Koppel and her wonderful gift for telling true stories about female friendship. In Between the Lines of the Red Leather Diary she wrote about her inter-generational friendship with Florence Wolfson Howitt—a ninety-year-old woman she tracked down after finding her old journal in a dumpster. Then in The Five of Us Koppel wrote about the powerful connection she has shared with her four childhood girlfriends and the divergent and intriguing paths their lives have taken.

Now Lily Koppel is celebrating the release of her new book The Astronaut Wives Club, which is about the wives of first Americans in space. Most of these women started out as ordinary military spouses who had to pinch pennies. Then their husbands catapulted to fame, and suddenly they were hounded by the media; they were getting what Koppel calls "space bling"; and they began to hear rumors about their husbands' infidelities. As the pressure mounted, booze and tranquilizers became one way to cope, but the wives' enduring friendship with each other was what really got most of them through.

Check out the New York Post's review of The Astronaut Wives Club and the vintage images from the Space Age on BuzzFeed.

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