"I imagined millions of parts greasy, nicked, worn, abraded, melting. It might take only one malfunction to kill them all. The whole thing would become a fireball right on the launch pad. Shockwaves of fire and heat billowing out to where we stood - right before our eyes - and this woman with a baby would scream and cry for her husband."  Margaret Lazarus Dean reading from her novel, "The Time it Takes to Fall."

A full crowd at Hodges Library Auditorium got the chance to witness Margaret Lazarus Dean read her own work and explain her methods for writing her book, "The Time it Takes to Fall," Monday night.

 "It's set against the backdrop of the Challenger disaster," Michael Knight, head of the English department, said. "It's a testament to Margaret's skill as a writer, the way she weaves the protagonist's personal drama into the much larger fabric of this national tragedy."

The protagonist is Dolores Gray, an adolescent girl whose father works for NASA. Dolores is obsessed with space, has dreams to be an astronaut, and the prodigious math and physics skills to realize this dream.

"None of these things are true of me," Dean said. "I'm not from Florida. I'm not from a NASA family. I never wanted to be an astronaut and I've never even taken physics."

Dean quickly amended part of this quote by saying she had not taken physics before the book. As part of her research, Dean audited an introductory physics course at University of Michigan.

Dean visited Florida to see a shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral while researching the book, though she said her draft didn't change much after the launch because she had already seen many launches on television and accurate depictions of launches in movies. 

Dean believes that whether or not research makes a clear impact on a book and shows up specifically in the writing, it is still immensely useful in helping to enter the world the author is trying to bring to life.

Like her protagonist, Dean was 13 in January 1986 when the Challenger broke apart.

"I had always really carried a memory of that event as being really weird, really a singular moment in my history," she said. "This was really the worst thing that had ever happened for kids of my generation, so I sort of wanted to write about that, in a way, at such an innocent time, when the worst thing that had happened was seven people dying."

"They fell for two minutes and 45 seconds. Longer than anyone has ever fallen unfettered. They have more time to contemplate their impending deaths than anyone ever to feel the acceleration of 32 feet per second per second, but - and this is the odd thing about falling - no matter how far you fall, no matter how long they wait, and how certain they are now that no parachute, no mat, no nothing can save them, in the moment just before impact they're still perfectly whole; breathing, living, and in that state it's impossible, impossible to believe in their own deaths." Margaret Lazarus Dean reading from her novel, "The Time it Takes to Fall."