On Another Planet They Can Save Me: Lieke Marsman’s memoir

By Elena Vasquez

The review reports that Lieke Marsman died in June at 35. Her memoir, On Another Planet They Can Save Me, is “part scream, part song” and charts the gradual dissolution of her rational assumptions.

The reviewer calls it “a brilliant, playful, layered and humane plea for openness and hope in the face of her own foxhole of intolerable suffering.” The former Dutch poet laureate tests assumptions about God, extraterrestrial life and the limits of reason.

What does fear do to reason?

The review invokes the saying “There are no atheists in foxholes” and presents war or conflict as a force that can drive religious belief. It cites Joseph Henrich and colleagues’ 2019 survey of almost 2,000 people in three post-conflict societies: Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan.

The researchers found that conflict had prompted participation in Christian and Muslim rituals and groups. The review concludes that atheism may be as fragile as faith and places this finding beside Marsman’s encounter with mortality.

“No matter how attached you are to your own rational worldview, your rationality won’t survive long under the threat of imminent death,” Marsman writes.

Her premise joins a large social study to a private crisis. Fear tests belief and reason in equal measure.

How does a terminal diagnosis unsettle certainty?

Marsman received the diagnosis in 2018, at 27. It was a rare and incurable form of cartilage cancer, and she described its physical progression this way:

“There are little balls of failed cartilage in my lungs, balls that will slowly, agonisingly, take over until, at last, I suffocate,” she writes.

A doctor told her the illness was terminal. She screamed, then asked:

“[H]ow else are you supposed to behave when handed a death sentence?”

Desperate to live, she underwent a barrage of treatments, including an operation to remove her arm and shoulder. The memoir ranges from surgery to immunotherapy.

Despite that ordeal, the review finds remarkably little about Marsman’s body. She deliberately redirects attention away from physical detail:

“After all, isn’t a disease only really interesting to the one who has it?”

“The temperature of my anus doesn’t affect the temperature of the world.”

Her early plunge into medical detail becomes an argument for widening the frame. The physical crisis recedes so philosophical and spiritual questions can come forward.

Which thinkers widen the memoir’s field?

According to the review, Marsman gradually unpicks her materialism and positivism. She opens herself to God, reads about the supernatural, and wonders whether aliens may come down and take her away.

“Sometimes I think I’m going crazy, at other moments I think how crazy I was not to have allowed myself to broaden my perspective until now.”

The reviewer calls the ground “well-trodden” but praises Marsman’s language as “so beautiful.” Sophie Collins, her translator, “has done a fine job,” and the original textual references make the book feel, in the review’s words, as if “we are walking on fresh turf.”

Her references include:

• Leopardi, Pasolini, Alanis Morissette and Robert Musil
• Spinoza, Euripides, Wittgenstein and William James

The memoir’s range is broad, but its center stays fixed on certainty and mortality.

Where does scientific certainty end?

The reviewer says the most interesting sections do not come from artists or writers reflecting on mortality or rationalism. They come from scientists doubting the solidity of the scientific frameworks they constructed.

“To speak in terms of Plato’s well-known simile,” wrote cosmologist James Jeans, “we are still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch the shadows on the wall.”

The passage places scientific doubt beside Marsman’s spiritual opening without resolving either. Scientific doubt and religious hope become parallel answers to uncertainty.

What ordinary details survive beside death?

The memoir’s mundane details counter the scale of the diagnosis. Marsman and her girlfriend spent hundreds of euros on empanadas, and she explains:

“[E]ven when you’re dying, you have to eat, and those things only need a blast in the oven.”

When she woke from the operation without her arm, the first thing she craved was “a croissant.” The review reads these details as a strange blend of ordinary appetite and otherworldly stakes.

Humour offers another release. Marsman considers absurd additions to her obituary, including crashing in a paraglider or riding a go-kart.

Food, desire and mischief stop terminal illness from becoming the memoir’s only subject. The everyday becomes a practical form of resistance.

Why does the memoir leave hope open?

The reviewer says a review serves potential readers but can also function as a dialogue with its author. Here, however, Marsman has no right of reply because she died in June at 35.

The reviewer calls the book more than a memoir and a testament. To review it feels almost sacrilegious; the reviewer suggests that it may be best to let the author speak.

“[D]ying with hope, however far-fetched and unrealistic that might be, is always better than continuing to live without it. And in those moments when everything in the here and now turns out to be utterly hopeless, I allow myself to think: on another planet they can save me.”

The reviewer closes by hoping that the other planet exists and that Marsman is still writing, somewhere and somehow. Her closing position leaves the cosmos unresolved, but not her decision to hope. The memoir’s lasting challenge is whether hope can remain active without certainty.