Taylor Jenkins Reid Says Stargazing with Her Daughter Inspired New Novel Atmosphere (Exclusive)

Between the Blue Origin flight that recently carried Katy Perry, Gayle King and others to space, and astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ delayed return to Earth during the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, the cosmos are in the zeitgeist. And Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel, Atmosphere, will only continue the trend.

Set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program, the book follows Joan Goodwin, a physics and astronomy professor presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: to join one of the first NASA missions to send female astronauts into space.

But despite the book’s out-of-this-world plot, it was influenced by very down-to-earth moments that the bestselling author shared with her 9-year-old daughter, Lilah.

“Atmosphere pushed me to learn about astronomy, and to go outside and look up at the night sky,” Reid tells PEOPLE for a feature in this week’s print issue. “There is, for me, something really close to magical about standing in my backyard and looking up and seeing Orion’s Belt …. It gives such a beautiful sense of how the world is turning in both a literal way and a metaphorical way.”

“I’m really happy to say that my kid has been indulging me, and is doing it with me too, and now can spot certain constellations just by her eye,” the author adds. “It just feels like an immense gift that this book has given me.”

For Reid, the mastermind behind bestselling novels like Daisy Jones & The Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Carrie Soto is Back, crafting her books has always been a family affair. Her screenwriter husband Alex, who Reid met while working in casting, has long been her biggest supporter. And their family also forms a de facto feedback group for the author.“He doesn’t write novels, but he still understands a novel’s structure, and so I bounce all of my ideas off him,” she says. Lilah, an avid reader, also assists.

“She knows all of my stories. She hasn’t read them, but I have told them all to her as bedtime stories,” Reid says. “Because she is very curious, she also helps me. I talk about a problem that I’m having. I come down to the dinner table from my office, and I say, ‘Oh, I can’t figure this out, and she will ask questions, and she’ll say, ‘Well, could you do this or that.’”

“I’m indulged greatly in this house, with people giving a lot of attention to me, trying to figure these things out,” Reid adds. Sometimes that even means getting the kind of advice that might not sound like a compliment at first blush.

“[Lilah] told me that she suspected that I was not the best writer in the world: that I was probably also not the worst writer in the world, and that I was in between, and I should be pretty happy about that,” Reid says.

“I took a minute, and I was like, ‘You’re totally right.’ I mean, maybe all writers should really be aspiring to understand that we are not the best in the world,” the author adds. “She always is there to give me a good dose of perspective.”

Crafting her latest novel and its empowering protagonist gave Reid a new outlook too, especially when it comes to the beauty of the stars.

“Writing the book made it very difficult for me to ever take that for granted again,” she says. “My hope is that there will be some people who feel that awe that I feel, and that Joan feels.