This woman is Iris, a twenty-eight-year-old office worker in London whose job is to help brands market themselves digitally. She is deep in the toxic pond that is the capitalist machine, helping faceless, disembodied corporations maximise their reach. Suddenly, there comes news of a wormhole that has opened up in the Pacific Ocean which leads to a distant planet someone has named Nyx. The folly in Iris’s thinking is clear: she believes a new start on Nyx can wipe her clean and thus eliminate the Smog. She wants to believe the problem stems from various trappings of modern life – an essentially meaningless job, the ready availability of drugs and alcohol, social media – and not, you know, her brain. Ironically, some of those things facilitate Iris’s path to Life on Nyx: instead of seeing a doctor or therapist, she self-medicates with drugs bought online, meaning it’s easy to lie her way through health questions when she’s interviewed (by an AI) for the show. I knew I would love this, because it seems like a nightmare to me, giving up everything you know for that idealistic perfect world that is never going to be as good as you imagined. Things can, and will go horribly wrong, and when they go wrong, who can you turn to to save you? Wow, but Jillian Lauren has had a crazy life. And man, does she know how to write about it. This, her second memoir, focuses on her marriage and struggle with infertility and her ultimate decision to adopt a boy from Ethiopia. When he has attachment issues, her ability to throw herself into trying to figure out how best to help him is remarkable. I already knew that parenting was hard, but I can't even imagine dealing with a toddler who has had emotional trauma. Now I have to decide if I want to read her first memoir that details her life in a harem and as a drug addict...???

We take the planet as a given, and we want to see it more than we want to understand it. I cannot thank Sauma enough for this. For disregarding the pseudo-science that bogs down and overcomplicates so much modern sci-fi with needless tedium. Here’s a planet, here’s how we get there, now let’s see it.i think it would have been a more compelling story if instead of a planet where iris had to give up everything, the planet she would go to would have everything earth had or something different. but i find that it would be hard for readers (unless you’re extremely depressed) to relate to the appeal of wanting everything bad, but also GOOD, in your life to be removed and to give up virtually everything you know and love to live on a planet we barely know anything about. i think this way the message of being grateful for everything you have would have come across stronger. Lauren keeps this book incredibly honest (something that I think is essential in a memoir) and it is often very sweet and funny and unbearably sad. And her wonderful writing makes the whole thing beautiful.

Sauma asks us to consider Iris’s choice. Is it cowardice, or suicide, or the chance of a lifetime? A severing of the ties that bind, or the one way to make them worthwhile? Tinged with melancholy and yearning, this novel is wry and frequently beautiful, and its culmination is surprising and deeply moving.

Luiza Sauma has injected a little life into this genre by personalising it. Rather than grand, epic, sweeping futurism, we have here an intimate tale of one woman’s yearning for both an escape from the drudgery of our cyclical life (work, home, sleep, work) and a way to feel like she was part of something important, both personally and professionally. It feels jumbled, and while the open-ended elasticity of the scenario ought to be a good thing, it seems accidental, not designed – a symptom of how much is left dangling in a novel that proves more tantalising than fulfilling. Why did she want to go? Life on another planet is a reasonable choice for a scientist, or an adventurer. It appears to make no sense at all for a personality like Iris. Her only incentives seem to be boredom and a quest for some sort of fame. These are strange motivations, and speak of a very deep desperation indeed.

At the half-way point the sci-fi aspect of the novel takes the wheel and we get to see a stripped-down kind of science-fiction that doesn’t deal in technicalities. In many sci-fi fans’ minds, there are three approaches to sci-fi. There’s hard sci-fi, which concerns itself with real-world science and obsesses over the technicalities of the science-and-engineering details (Arthur C. Clarke). Here is a woman so disturbed by the cycle of drudgery that is modern corporate city life – and even beyond that, a woman with unresolved issues of depression and familial turmoil – that life on a pink desert planet seems so utterly appealing. Jillian is the author of the new memoir, EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED, the New York Times bestselling memoir, SOME GIRLS: My Life in a Harem, and the novel, PRETTY, all from Plume/Penguin.pg. 205 "Nothing I've encountered in my life has hurled me into darkness as fiercely as this rejection by my son. Not death,...not being disowned, not depressions, nothing. Even when I'm able to remain grounded and patient and not take it personally all day long (it's a rare day, but it happens) come bedtime I still find myself in tears, thinking that in a million years I never imagined being a mother would feel like this. I go over and over it in my head. What are the things about our turbulent relationship that might be my fault? What might I be able to control, to change simply by changing me? As if changing were that easy, but I can't help running through the possibilities. What if I worked less? What if I yelled less? What if I was better at the life balance? What if I was more fun? What if I was better? Would that make my child love me? But even as I castigate myself, I also see a more likely story. With all of the trauma and transition in his short life, it's logical that he would make sure to do the rejecting rather than risk being hurt again." pg. 135 "People are constantly saying: Oh, it's a boy thing. Oh, it's a stage. Oh, everyone goes through that. They mean to be helpful, but I am left feeling lonely and inadequate. If everyone goes through this, why does it feel so insurmountable?"

Lauren was writing Some Girls at the time that the events of Everything You Ever Wanted were taking place, and while normally I'm not a huge fan of memoir-meta—that is, memoirists writing about writing their memoirs—it makes a lot of sense here because, well, it's part of the story. How do you become a parent when your uterus says no? How do you not, when it's the one thing you've been desperate to do? How do you reconcile a colourful past with a new, more 'traditional' role as 'mother'? How do you balance parent and writer? And, most pressingly, what do you do when there is clearly something wrong with your child, but doctors write it off? I loved reading about Iris pre-Nyx and I loved reading about Life on Nyx, so I powered through most of the book happily, savouring Sauma’s great eye for detail and spot-on dialogue. The reason my rating isn’t higher is a certain development towards the end. I have an inbuilt bias against this particular type of development, but also, in this case it doesn’t add anything to the story. Nevertheless, I thought the ending itself was really strong, delivering a realistic denouement while preserving an inkling of hope.

Everything You Ever Wanted is a real breath of fresh air for science fiction – a genre which has felt a little lost of late. Perhaps there’s something to be said though, in our current climate, for the current boom in the fantasy genre, one defined by its powers of escapism, versus the gloom of sci-fi, a genre that’s at its peak when it’s holding up a mirror to the current state of the world around it.