Emily Austin's latest novel Interesting Facts About Space explores reckoning with fear and letting people in

The Next Chapter12:53Interesting Facts About Space and a phobia of bald men

Ottawa-based writer Emily Austin talks about her funny, heartfelt novel about being yourself and more importantly being OK with that.

Sunsets on Mars are blue. Spaghettification is a legitimate term in astrophysics. Moons can have moons: they're called moon moons. These are just a few of the cool tidbits shared in Emily Austin's second novel Interesting Facts About Space.

Interesting Facts About Space tells the story of Enid, a space-obsessed serial-dating lesbian. With a penchant for true crime podcasts, she can easily handle the vastness of space and gruesome murder details. But she's got one major phobia: bald men. And while she desperately tries to keep it under control, she can't shake the feeling that someone is following her.

Austin is a writer based in Ottawa who studied English literature and library science at Western University. She is also the author of the novel Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers.

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She spoke with Ali Hassan to discuss fear, invisible disabilities and connection in Interesting Facts About Space.

How did you come up with the phobia of bald men?

Normally when I set out to write a book, my original intention is to write something funny. And I don't normally succeed at that. I end up writing something that's partially funny, but I write a lot about mental health and there's a bit of darkness to it. But my intention is always to write something funny. And so when I came up with the premise that I wanted the main character to have a phobia, I thought, I'm gonna find a phobia that sounds funniest to me. And that one was listed. So I thought, that's the one I'll go with.

Though Enid's fear is funny, it's very real and affects her day-to-day life. Tell me some of the ways that she copes with this fear.

She's a lesbian and her dad isn't in the picture and her best friend is a man with a full head of hair, so it doesn't disrupt her life in major ways until she gets a neighbour who's bald and then one of her co-workers is bald. She then starts doing strange things like leaving her apartmentthrough the window rather than through the door to avoid seeing that neighbour and avoids calls and and meetings with that co-worker. And her anxiety sort of intensifies as the story goes on and she starts to feel like someone's following her and she worries that maybe it's the bald neighbour.

Throughout the book, Enid often says she feels like she has a parasite. Why does she feel that way?

She feels like she has a parasite because that was the vehicle that I used to give an actual sort of creature to this problem that she has. She feels like something's wrong with her. She feels like she has some major defect.

She feels like something's wrong with her. She feels like she has some major defect.- Emily Austin

A lot of the story is also partly about Enid having social struggles and she's deaf in one ear and she was abandoned by her dad. And so she carries this sense that something is terribly wrong with her and the parasite is sort of a vehicle to communicate that.

This deafness in one ear is sort of an invisible disability and we don't often see characters with invisible disabilities in literature. Why was that important for you to include in the story?

So I was fortunate to work with a sensitivity reader who had experience with hearing loss as well, who hopefully helped make that represented accurately. I'm blind in one eye and so partly, when I write a book, I like to think about the experiences I've had in my life and what I could draw from to write about. And I didn't want to write a character who's blind in one eye because since my first novel, I've noticed that I sometimes get spoken to as if I'm that character in the book, so I wanted it to not blur the line too much.

We might not have the right impression of people, we might not really understand the full story.- Emily Austin

And a lot of the story, again, is about Enid having this fear that something's wrong with her. She deals with this phobia. She's a neurodivergent character. And so her also being deaf sort of helped communicate the idea that we all have our secret challenges, that you can't necessarily clock just by seeing someone, and the way that we behave is motivated by lots of secret things. And we might not have the right impression of people, we might not really understand the full story.

To address the title of your book, Interesting Facts About Space, Enid uses space facts as a way to connect with her mother, who's living with depression. So how do these space facts serve as both a buffer and a means for connection?

Enid struggles to be open about her feelings and so does her mom. And part of the story is about her fear, not just of bald men, but also her fear of getting close to people. And she struggles to tell her mom, "I'm worried about you," or even to say, "I love you," for example.

And rather than do that, when she thinks of her mom, she calls her or texts her or talks to her about interesting facts about space. Enid is also supposed to be a neurodivergent character and so she has sort of hyperfixations on certain things. She's hyperfixated on true crime and she has a special interest in space. And so it's also supposed to show her sort of strange attempt at communicating that she cares about her mom to her in a sort of veiled way.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.