Scared of bald men and love, this novel’s protagonist savors ‘Interesting Facts About Space’

Meet the narrator of Emily Austin’s second novel, “Interesting Facts About Space”: Her name is Enid. She is a tall lesbian with short hair and “a sleeve of tattoos featuring anthropomorphic rats wearing Victorian dresses.” She works on search engines for the Space Agency with her only friend, a gay man named Vin. Her hobby is listening obsessively to true crime podcasts, and the imagery and language of these stories infiltrates her inner life. For example, here she is at her half-sister’s gender-reveal party:

“I set the cake down on Gina’s marble countertop. The moment my fingers release the glass platter, I feel the same sort of reprieve killers must after successfully burying a body. To celebrate ridding myself of the transphobic baked good, I fix myself a mimosa.”

Despite her well-honed sense of irony, she is wracked by dark thoughts, imagining she has “a creature crawling inside me, trying to migrate to my brain. I picture him like Plankton from SpongeBob SquarePants; a malevolent little mastermind who is trying to use my body like a Trojan horse.”

Gosh, don’t you love her already? I certainly did, though I also wondered what had happened to make her so messed up. It seems she herself doesn’t know. One of the interesting facts about Enid is that throughout her childhood and adolescence, she created a YouTube channel with thousands of hours of content. Titles include “Confronting My Bullies. That’s Right, Chelsea, This One Is for You” and “When I Grow Up and Am Famous, I Am Going to Tell Every Interviewer That Theodora Called Me a Dyke.”

She tortures herself by watching these videos, as if poking a bruise. Some of them come from a period of which she claims to have no recollection, though she knows, as we do, that this likely means something bad happened, something she has willfully pushed below the level of consciousness.

Things are getting worse for Enid. Her irrational fear of bald men is increasing, she’s convinced there’s a stalker watching her apartment and her serial dating is spiraling, too. “I think on some level I am less interested in dating than I am in being repeatedly rejected so that I can stew in that comfortable bad feeling. There is something soothing about being rejected. It really anchors you in your body. It feels like a bath.”

No, Enid! It does not! And anyway, your latest girlfriend, Polly, is really into you! Don’t send her your form-letter breakup text! Shoot — too late.

The reader suspects early on that some of the answers Enid needs lie with her mom, who is also suffering from pretty severe emotional difficulties, which the two women navigate around by limiting their conversations to “interesting facts about space”: blue sunsets on Mars and diamond rain on Jupiter and Saturn.

But never fear. Enid may be an unreliable narrator but Emily Austin is a reliable author, and she resolves this whole situation in a very satisfying way. It was not until I almost started to cry that I realized how much she had made me care.

Marion Winik is a Baltimore-based teacher and writer.

Interesting Facts About Space

By: Emily Austin.

Publisher: Atria, 320 pages, $27.99.