Reality TV and commercial space travel collide in Deborah Willis's novel Girlfriend on Mars
Bridget Raymundo | CBC Books | Posted: October 3, 2023 3:18 PM | Last Updated: October 3, 2023
The Calgary writer's debut novel is longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize
In reflecting on the current environmental and social climate of our world, author Deborah Willis ventured to write a book which explores characters who would leave it in exchange for the mysterious planet of Mars. Her debut novel, Girlfriend on Mars is on the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 11.
Girlfriend on Mars is a satirical story about tragic love and commercial space travel. Amber Kivinen is one of 23 reality TV contestants vying for two spots on the first commercial trip to Mars aboard MarsNow, a space shuttle commissioned by the billionaire Geoff Task. Amber is surrounded by a cast of unlikely characters, including an Israeli soldier and social media influencers, while her long-term partner, Kevin, stays at home with the plants and starts to wonder: why does his girlfriend feel such a desire to leave the planet?
Willis is a fiction writer currently based in Calgary. She debuted in 2009 with Vanishing and Other Stories which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. She followed it up with a collection of short fiction entitled The Dark and Other Love Stories in 2017, which was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Willis spoke to CBC Books about how she wrote Girlfriend on Mars.
The allure of Mars
"The idea [for Girlfriend on Mars] came to me almost exactly 10 years ago. It came partly because there was a real idea for a reality show that never got made that would send people to Mars on a one-way trip. The book takes that concept and totally changes it in a lot of ways, but the thing that stuck with me when I was reading about it was that so many people applied, like hundreds of thousands of people!
"I was totally struck by this willingness. As I thought about it more, the underlying values that people have where exploration is the most important thing, maybe even more important than my own family. There's something almost admirable about it, this adventurousness and this willingness to learn and to even sacrifice yourself for that knowledge. Then also something that seemed to me emblematic of Western cultures individualism and the kind of cult of achievement.
There's a real cultural investment in the idea of Mars. - Deborah Willis
"There's a real cultural investment in the idea of Mars and I think the research that was most interesting to me was the history of our ideas about Mars. I read this beautiful book called The Sirens of Mars [by Sarah Stewart Johnson] and she talks about the way that Mars has called to us ever since science has been able to look out into the cosmos.
"She talks about one scientist named William Pickering. I mentioned him in the novel, where during the First World War he had this total fantasy where he looked out at Mars through his telescope and he believed he saw a rainforest, essentially. What seemed to be most important to him was that this pristine rain soaked landscape was empty of humans. There was no one there causing the kind of pain that was being caused down here on Earth in that First World War."
From reading to writing satire
"I read satire that gave me courage. I hadn't written in this style before, but I read The Sellout by Paul Beatty. The book is totally different, but he went everywhere and mocks everyone. I was struck by that because I am a person firmly on the left. I have certain political values but I was like, 'you know, sometimes you're going to have to mock yourself too.' So I think that was a big influence.
"Also George Saunders — I found his writing was in the back of my mind, especially those earlier short stories like in the collection Pastoralia where characters are looking at these absurd jobs at theme parks and the way he balances humour and pathos like the sadness and the humour within each character, I felt like I wanted to capture what he does so well."
Discovering reality television
"I actually feel embarrassed to admit but I don't really watch reality TV. It's such a writer thing to say, but when I went to write about reality TV, my first thing that I did was go and take books out of the library about reality TV because I wanted to understand the behind the scenes feeling of it. Then I went and I watched Survivor and I watched the adventure type reality TV series. I was lucky because my partner watched every single episode of Survivor when it was at its height and he was a big help to me.
It didn't feel truthful to me to write a book about people on this planet in this era of human history without going to a darkness. - Deborah Willis
"I found it nerve wracking because I don't think a publisher could resist marketing it as a book about Mars and a book about reality TV. There's a fun romp element to that and I knew that a lot of readers would pick it up and then be very disturbed or let down by the way that it gets dark at the end.
"I was nervous about that because to me, exploring that darkness alongside the humour and the fun romp element of it felt essential. It didn't feel truthful to me to write a book about people on this planet in this era of human history without going to a darkness."
Finding hope
"For me as a human being, I wanted to have a whisper of hope at the end. It's not like we're just headed towards disaster necessarily as a global society but there is so much pain so I wanted to have a bit of a balance there too which I found challenging. But I didn't want to leave people in despair. I want to leave people with a note of hope and the sense that connection is really what's going to bring us through.
"I do feel like in order to get through the coming decades, where we're undergoing these big societal shifts, I think that environmental debt is coming due.
"We're in for some challenging times and I guess my feeling was that we have to, as a culture, face the sadness, the grief, the intensity of some of these feelings that it's going to bring up. My hope is that stories can help us to do that and my greatest hope is that this shift in values that we need to have can be helped in some tiny way by my book. Even though I feel like I am absolutely, definitely still struggling to shift my own values – I'm still working towards it, just like everybody else."
Deborah Willis' comments have been edited for clarity and length.