INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE

A 26-year-old woman works to better understand how her past is affecting her present relationships.

Enid, an information architect at the Space Agency and a true-crime aficionado, is caught in a complicated behavioral pattern of her own making, she thinks. Her father left her mother when she was young to start another family, destroying her mother emotionally in the process. Her half sisters, Edna and Kira, have recently welcomed her into their lives. But Enid is convinced that there’s something wrong with her, despite having a good job, a good life, and being a caring daughter to her mother (who suffers from severe bouts of depression). She has a phobia about bald men, cleans obsessively, and dates continually yet refuses to stay with anyone longer than a month or two; she’s also unhappy with her proclivity to take the easiest route and lean into expected behavior rather than doing what she believes is best. Case in point: Though she’s a lesbian who has a complicated relationship with her gender identity, when her half sister asks her to bake a cake for her sister’s gender reveal party, she immediately says yes and then berates herself for not standing up for what she believes in. The novel follows Enid as she seeks to better understand her worsening phobias and the way they’ve started to negatively affect her job and life. She starts therapy, begins to let people see the real her, and works to unpick the knots in her memory that are compromising her ability to live her life. Enid is introspective without being irritating.

A complicated, layered exploration of how bullying, fear, and a desperate desire to fit in have lasting effects.