“There are parts of me I wish I could train out that I can't. You can train a dog not to bite, sit on the furniture, or piss in the house, but you can't train them to become birds.
I don't like a lot of unalterable things about myself.“

Enid was a character I related to deeply. It was funny, poignant, moving, absurd - I loved it all!

Emily Austin has a way of cutting to the marrow when it comes to reflecting on the queer experience. I will read any book Emily writes because I know I will feel seen amongst its pages.

I may also never look at a bald man the same way again.

This is a book that reminds you that you've never had a unique experience in the best way. That you've done things you feel bad about, shut out memories, held onto hurts, wondered if you're being paranoid, and contemplated on a regular basis if you are in fact a bad person and you've done an amazing job of convincing the world that you're normal.

I could've lived in this world and Enid's day to day for a lot longer. I wanted to dive into each of her relationships and choices for a hundred pages each. Enid is definitely a character that feels a bit like she's tripping through life but is also incredibly capable and together when it matters.

At once both utterly relatable and particularly unique, Interesting Facts About Space is a reminder that we don't have to be perfect, we just have to try.

I will definitely be reading more by this author!

Emily Austin does it again!!! Enid works at the National Space Agency, listens to tons of true crime podcasts, and has a hobby of casually dating women from the apps without getting attached. She's also afraid that everyone is going to discover her secret: she has a parasite inside of her, and it makes her do terrible things.

This book is so darkly hilarious, and made me laugh out loud frequently. At the same time, certain lines are so cutting, and just stab me right in the heart. It’s a satirical exaggeration of anxiety, and yet it’s only a few steps beyond what anxiety feels like to me, so sometimes it describes the experience of anxiety with completely relatable clarity. The relationships are so beautiful that they make me well up. And even amidst a lot of tension that the worst is about to happen (thank you Enid's anxiety), this is an ultimately heartwarming and hopeful novel.

I'm so looking forward to reading anything Emily Austin writes in the future, and I can't recommend this book enough.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Atria books for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.*

This book starts slow and is unique. Yep, unique in a good way. A great way. Once I adapted, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed all of Enid's interesting facts about space. Enid's mom was a really good mom. Enid is a queer, Neurodivergent, half deaf person who works at the space agency. Enid deals with a lot of rude people assuming she can hear. Enid feels that someone is watching her and someone has broken into her apartment. She really likes listening to true crime podcasts. Enid has a phobia of bald men. Seriously when I see bald men. Enid hasn't had a relationship in a long time. But has dated a lot of people.

I really loved this book. I'm excited to have found this author and read her other book. I'm so glad I picked this as my January BoTM pick.

Austin's sophomore novel is witty, relatable, and down-to-earth. The writing style sucks the reader in, and the main character is incredibly well-developed.

Thank you Atria and Netgalley for an ARC of " Interesting Facts About Space". I typically don't pick up books where the synopsis is this vague, but I am so glad I did. The reader learns immediately that the main character Enid, is a little off. She is beyond paranoid, yet listens to true crime podcasts to calm down. She is afraid of strangers and think everyone is out to murder her, but uses Tinder regularly to find someone to keep her company since she is scared of sleeping alone. She watches old videos she posted of herself on Youtube when she was going through her awkward preteen years so she feels better about who she is today. She feels guilt that her father cheated on her mom, and feels like whenever she connects with her half sisters that she needs to check in on her mom and offer her an interesting fact about space. This character would be annoying, if she wasn't so relatable. She portrays all of the fascinating quirks that make each of us exactly who we are supposed to be. I enjoyed this book thoroughly, but what resonated with me the most is when Enid meets a stranger and offers to buy her a sandwich because shes had a bad night. She assures the stranger she is a bad person and not many people want to maintain a relationship with her, and she prefers single interactions even when they are good. The stranger reminds her that regardless of her past with other people, she will always be the nice girl who bought her a sandwich. It reminds the reader that we are a different person to literally every person we interact with, and that is a profound thought.

beautiful, amazing, showstopping, spectacular !!!!

this was by far my most anticipated release for 2024, when i got approved for the arc i nearly passed out! everyone in this room will someday be dead, this authors first book, is one of my absolute favorites and i’ve been impatiently waiting for this release. every part of this book was even better than i could have imagined and i don’t know how to go on reading this year when this is most likely going to be my favorite read from 2024. emily austin, i have to say it, YOU are the star!! never stop writing because your books are so damn good and the mean so much and… I. AM. OBSESSED.

this book is for the paranoid girlies. like every aspect of enid’s character is a paranoid girlie and i get that so much. one of my favorite parts of both of these books is the stream of consciousness writing style. by the end of the story you feel so satisfied. everything fits perfectly together and every little detail that was mentioned in the story makes sense all of a sudden. the storytelling is so good in both of these books. the story feels so incredibly real and that’s what makes is so good. you don’t feel like you’re reading some strange piece of fiction from someones head, you get that this could happen in real life and that makes the ending even better. seeing people, normal people, being okay is so powerful. it makes this book feel like it could cater to everyone. for me sort of being that paranoid girlie i totally get enid and seeing her growth was so heartwarming. not just her personal growth either, her growth in relationships (romantic, familial, and platonic) was beautifully written and almost made me tear up like five times in the last 20 pages. i wouldn’t call enid an unreliable narrator but sometimes you don’t know what’s going on because she doesn’t either and when she finally learns and gets better or just gets help, you the reader feel immense love for her. seeing her happy and just okay was amazing and low key inspirational because with a real story like this it gives hope to anyone how even slightly resonates with enid.

the ensemble of characters honestly makes this book !! form the sisters, to the mom, to vin and polly… even gina I guess… they all made this story have so many more layers. the more you learned about each of them the more complete this story began to feel and it just ended up being so whole and gorgeous and i love it. the writing was so masterful throughout the whole book. multiple times when i was annotating i would write down how greatly a paragraph sounded. after reading this authors debut i believed she couldn’t improve upon perfection and boy was i glad to be wrong. i’m going to end this review now but not because i have nothing left to say, just because i’ve ran out of adjectives for great. i will be talking about this book to literally everyone i know for the foreseeable future. please, please, please run to pick this up immediately when it releases on january 30th, you won’t regret it!! and incase you needed more inspiration to add this to your tbr, just know it was so good i even annotated the acknowledgment…

*thank you NetGalley for the ARC*

This ended up being sooooooo much better than I initially expected. At first, not much at all happened. Our main character, Enid, went to work, went on a couple of dates, talked to her mom on the phone—all very ordinary happenings. I kept reading, though, because I began to enjoy watching Enid develop relationships with others. Also, it was one of my Book of the Month selections (iykyk 😅). At one point, Enid found herself regularly seeing a therapist, and this reader and Enid simultaneously gained an answer to the question ‘Who is Enid?’ While there was a plot to the story, the main focus of this novel was character development. I’m so glad I didn’t give up!

Side note: I loved Polly. I mean, she called a stranger a bitch to her face. What’s not to love?

I loved "Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead", and I wanted to love this one too. But it just felt exhausting to read. I don't think it helped that I don't like true crime podcasts and the main character is obsessed with them.

"Interesting Facts about Space" is a delightful and briskly paced novel that seamlessly blends humor, heart, and a touch of existential exploration. Enid, the protagonist, is a character readers will quickly grow to love, with her quirky obsession with space, peculiar phobia of bald men, and an endearing penchant for true crime podcasts. The narrative skillfully weaves together Enid's comedic misadventures in serial dating with her attempts to connect with her half-sisters after the passing of her absent father, creating a rich tapestry of relationships and self-discovery.

The novel's strength lies in its ability to balance Enid's hilarious escapades with moments of genuine introspection and vulnerability. As Enid grapples with her mounting paranoia and the belief that someone is following her, readers are taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions. "Interesting Facts about Space" not only entertains with its witty dialogue and fast-paced narrative but also imparts a meaningful message about embracing our quirks and revealing our vulnerabilities. With charm and humor, this novel explores the beautifully human aspects of self-acceptance, making it a thoroughly enjoyable and ultimately hopeful read.

While I enjoyed the neuro divergent narrator and found this to be pigment and funny, I really struggled to progress through it due to the lack of linearity.

Another interesting, complicated character by Emily Austin. Enid is a half-deaf woman who works at NASA and is terrified of bald men. Austin's writing makes you want to tear through everything she reads.

Thank you Atria for Interesting Facts about Space. I LOVED this book, I felt at times as if Emily Austin was in my head (not sure if that is good or bad but hey it was fun!). I admit, I love the hilarity of a character who is so delightfully herself even though Enid doesn't yet know that is the best part of her, what will save her from her sense of disconnection.

This book, the exploration of problematic family relationships, the desire for connection while running away from it/finding the idea of love and commitment to be simultaneously desirable and genuinely scary or off-putting...,the complete certainty that you might be the one person who just doesn't quite fit in the the puzzle of life... Those feelings are here in this book, along with some wonderful snark, and a character who can reflect a range of intersectional identities with themes on sexuality, neurodivergence a key part of Enid's story.

I haven't read Austin's first book but here I go adding another book to my list... :) This is a great read for fans of Where'd you go, Bernadette, Eleanor Oliphant, and other similar characters.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead was one of my favorite books of 2021, and I already know Interesting Facts About Space will be on my list for 2024. Her main characters, Enid and Gilda (from EiTRWSBD) are both lovably weird and uncomfortably relatable (even though I’m old enough to be their mothers). Austin has a funny, brilliant, original voice, and I laughed out loud so many times while reading Enid’s snarky observations.

This book also made me *extremely* happy that YouTube did not exist when I was an angsty teenager - having all of that craziness immortalized forever, where anyone can see it, locked behind a password I can’t remember, THE HORROR.

Highly recommend for anyone who listens to true crime podcasts to relax and/or has ever felt like maybe they’re a shell for a weird little bug that’s trying to take over. LOVED THIS.

I loved Emily Austin's first novel, and I'm so happy to say I loved her second as well. Enid was a super compelling character and the story was well-paced.

I first read everyone in this room will someday be dead by this author and instantly loved it. I thought it was an interesting but believable character. The same is true for interesting facts about space. I loved Enid and her friends and family who felt like real people you'd encounter and also both felt so hard to put down. Both books I think I read in a weekend. I will definitely continue to read from Emily Austin as her books are the perfect blend of quirky humor and heartfelt.

I suspect this was meant to be deep and meaningful, but honestly I found myself incredibly bored. I probably need to stop trying to read realistic fiction.

hello. this is my favorite book of all time, bar none.

after this second read through i've come to the conclusion that emily austin has the supernatural power to read minds because this book? this one? this book is about me. and maybe this book will be about you too.

here's what to know about enid: she's a lesbian with commitment issues, she's deaf in one ear, she's neurodivergent, she's covered in tattoos of rats in victorian dresses, she's obsessed with space, and she's terrified of bald men. which makes the fact that there's one following her very, very bad.

this book is about people dealing with their inner demons.

this book has enid navigating a tenuous relationship with her half-sisters edna and kira, born of a father that abandoned her when she was young. much of this book feels impacted by her father's decision to abandon enid and her mom - it manifests in enid constantly analyzing her wrongness, trying to identify the place in her head where the cogs and gears aren't working properly. she feeds this wrongness with a true crime podcast obsession, not out of fear that she'll become a victim but out of fear that she's something like the criminals that she's listening about.

enid's also constantly seeking new hook-ups with women on dating apps. she craves the validation of connection, but runs far, far away at the inkling of anything deeper than sex by sending partners a "dear john"-type form text she keeps in her notes app whenever she has to disengage.

we also see how her father's leaving has impacted her mother. her mom has it together some days, but some days her mom doesn't wear lipstick and the house falls into disarray. because enid struggles with the intimacy of expressing love, she communicates with her mom in facts about space - blue sunsets on mars and diamonds raining on jupiter and saturn.

this is a book about internalized grief, how we isolate ourselves, how when we're hurt by the people that we trust, we enshrine ourselves in layers of protection so that we can't be hurt the same way again, but how underneath all of that we're still people that need love. it's a book about how fear can hold us back and harm us, how we use fear to protect ourselves from being hurt but in the end we're the ones hurting ourselves.

i wish i could give this book one billion stars.

i love you, emily austin.

an extra note: emily has mentioned this book was heavily inspired by souvenir by boygenius. you will not be able to unsee julien baker as enid. listen to the song and read this book!

I read over a hundred books in 2023, and out of all of them, Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead was my favorite. Because of that, I had really high expectations for Interesting Facts About Space, and I was honestly worried I had *too* high of expectations, and I'd be disappointed because of that. Given all that as context, it's saying a lot that this book didn't disappoint in the slightest. It's exactly what I wanted, and even though we're only a week into 2024, I feel confident that it'll be among my favorites this year again.

I loved the way this was written, in every way you could love how a novel is written. There's something about Austin's writing that's just so perfect to me--it's relatable, it's interesting, it's funny, it's real, it's entertaining, it's engaging. I never had a dull moment while reading this, and couldn't put it down. I was rooting for Enid so much. This book also kind of fucked me up in more than one way, not gonna lie. I cried, I found some of it a little *too* relatable, and I got so sucked in at a couple points that I was worried the book would ruin my day (in a way that's both actually bad but also a real credit to the writing, in my opinion). But! It didn't ruin my day. I'm so glad I read this book and I can't wait for Emily Austin to write more books so I can get to experience feelings like this again. Genuinely, both this and Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead are the kind of books I would pay money to be able to forget and read again for the first time. I want to reread this again for sure, and I can't wait for it to come out so more people will read and talk about it.

Smaller comments for anyone who has read Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead and maybe could be worried it's the same for some reason (? idk): in comparison, I found Interesting Facts About Space to be less tense/stressful to read, and maybe more hopeful/happy in a way. (Moderate spoilers ahead for both books:) One of the most distressing parts about Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead (again, in a good way, I loved everything about that book, but still) was how hard Gilda found asking for help, and how much she lied to those around her and said she was fine. It was a relief when Enid finally went to therapy and started confessing what was going on to some people in her life. And again, I truly loved Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, and honestly don't know which book I like more at this point. But just in case anyone else found reading that one stressful, I think this one is less stressful to read. Less tense, even if it's still pretty dark and existential and all that.

Oh and another even smaller note--I wondered at many points while reading Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead if Gilda was autistic, but the book never addressed that, which was fine. While reading Interesting Facts About Space I kept thinking "this is the most autistic bitch I've ever read," so I was excited when the therapist mentioned she might be autistic. (For context I'm also autistic.)

I have so much I could say about this book but I don't even know where to start. Maybe when I inevitably reread it I'll come back and update this with some of my favorite parts. But genuinely it's like.....the entire book is my favorite? Everything about it? I'm just so glad I got to read it, and I'd recommend it to anyone (with my only reservation being if your mental health is *really* bad in similar ways to Enid's, then maybe this would be a little too real sometimes...but that's such a personal thing so who knows).

Thank you so much to Atria Books and Netgalley for the chance to read and review this ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Not really sure how Emily R. Austin manages to crawl inside my brain and put all my thoughts to paper, but she’s done it again. Our main character, Enid, is also endearing, quirky, and anxiety-consumed like Gilda in Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead. Enid is true crime obsessed, terrified of bald men, maybe a bit paranoid, and expresses her love through sharing facts about space. Again, Austin manages to write about love in the most moving ways. These characters do express their love in sort of unusual ways but it makes my heart swell every time (I maybe even cried a little at the end). I particularly loved Enid’s relationship with her mom and even the smallest expression of their love for each other would make me smile or tear up. They’re not perfect but that’s what makes these stories and the characters’ relationships so real. And Enid realizing how loved she is despite feeling like an innately bad and unlovable person…my heart.
Maybe it’s slightly closer to a 4.5/4.75 just because there were a few spots where it lulled for me, but again, I just struggle to think of another author who can perfectly express all my weird thoughts and experiences. Austin manages to create stories that let me know I’m not alone in my anxieties and allow me to even find the humor in the experiences and paranoia I have. It’s hilarious, and I was laughing out loud just a few pages in and then throughout most of the book. I felt sort of morbid when I died laughing reading EITRWSBD and then saw people reviewing saying how dark and depressing it was. But once again, I think Austin just uses dark humor fantastically. There are heavy topics for sure, and I would say they’re handled with care, though it does sort of all culminate towards the end and becomes more serious. I had to make myself stop highlighting because I would’ve had at least half of the book marked. And I was devastated when I realized it was all coming to an end. So, because of this and because it did end up picking back up for me, I’m going to round up to five stars. Austin is absolutely an auto-read forever, and I’m very grateful I got this ARC. I'd recommend to anyone who feels "messed up" or unlovable or like you have to pretend to be a human, and definitely if you enjoyed EITRWSBD!