January 29, 2024
Interesting Facts About Space, by Emily Austin
I adored Emily Austin’s debut Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which I recall reading during the sad pandemic summer of 2021 and being surprised by its capacity to delight me when not much else was doing the trick, and perhaps it was the mordant dread of its depressive protagonist that did it, her willingness to stare the absurdity of life’s darkness in the face—and be funny and achingly human all the while.
Austin’s sophomore novel, Interesting Facts About Space, is even better, the story of Enid, an information architect who works for the National Space Agency who texts her mother interesting facts about space whenever she worries about her, which is always. Because Enid’s mother has long struggled with her mental health, since Enid’s father left them when she was just a child, and Enid has made herself responsible for her mother’s well-being ever since, a Sisyphean task. Just one of many such tasks in Enid’s life, including finding connection on dating apps, overcoming her inexplicable phobia of bald men, resolving her fears that somebody is watching her and moving things around in her apartment when she’s not there, as well as establishing a relationship with her half-sisters, who she’s only just met since her estranged father’s recent death and who have no idea that she’s a lesbian and might react badly if they did. (She also recorded her entire adolescence on Youtube and lost the password so she can’t take the channel down, or resist watching her younger, naive self over and over again.)
Enid is not well, the impacts of trauma in her past finally catching up with her after years of avoidance, and following her along on this journey (while the narrative voice remains breezy and bright) verges toward agonizing. Except that it never gets there, because of how carefully Austin holds her reader’s heart, all the while it’s threatening to break into pieces. This novel is an emotional roller-coaster, about mothers and daughters, sisters, and lovers, and friendship, and what it means to show up for each other, and also to show up for one’s self.
