Lieke Marsman’s final book, published four months after her death, is a compact but uncompromising reckoning with terminal illness that alternates between rage, tenderness and wry observation. The memoir, titled On Another Planet They Can Save Me, follows the poet’s gradual confrontation with mortality and the ways in which extreme suffering rearranges conviction and consolation.
Contextualising that shift, Marsman invokes the old adage that there are "no atheists in foxholes" and examines how existential threat can prompt people to seek ritual and community. The review notes social-science research supporting that dynamic: a 2019 study led by Joseph Henrich surveyed almost 2,000 people in three post-conflict societies — Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan — and found that experience of conflict had led many to participate in Christian and Muslim rituals and groups, suggesting that atheism can be particularly fragile under life-threatening stress.
Marsman writes of the collapse of her own rational assumptions with unflinching candour. "No matter how attached you are to your own rational worldview, your rationality won’t survive long under the threat of imminent death," she declares, and the book traces that dissolution across subjects as wide-ranging as belief in God and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The result, the reviewer says, is a work that is at once "part scream, part song," moving between moments of despair and startling intervals of clarity.
Stylistically, the memoir is described as playful, layered and deeply humane. Marsman’s prose, forged in her background as a poet and former Dutch poet laureate, repeatedly returns to a plea for openness and hope even as it refuses consolation that feels false. Taken together, the book reads as both an intimate account of one woman’s final months and a broader reflection on how extreme illness reshapes identity, faith and the search for meaning.
The posthumous publication frames the book’s reception: readers and critics encounter these reflections knowing Marsman will not return to revise them. That knowledge intensifies the memoir’s emotional force, making it a work that asks both difficult questions and offers a stubborn, life-affirming refusal to be reduced to despair.