August 6, 2021

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, by Emily Austin

I will confess to having very little interest in all the sad, languishing literary heroines, the kind who embark upon years of rest and relaxation, spending entire chapters imagining what it might be like to have a job, asking such questions as, “How should a person be?” These literary people are just not to my taste, and so I was wary of Emily Austin’s debut novel, Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, about Gilda, who is overwhelmed by depression. And also a lesbian atheist who accidentally gets hired as a receptionist at a Catholic Church, and Gilda deals with this complication as head-on as she tackles everything in her life, which is to say: not at all. There’s also the mystery of her predecessor, an elderly woman whose death was suspicious. And the question of how many dirty dishes she can store in her closet before she’s forced to run some water in the sink.

I loved this book, which is very much internal, but where all the sad, languishing literary heroines are impossible company, Gilda is delightful. Her point of view entirely sympathetic, and the reader begins to cheer for the ER staff who receive her with tenderness as she arrives again and again with issues relating to anxiety. The whole narrative gets a little too madcap and threatens to go off the rail in places, but it holds steady, as Gilda doesn’t, and her despair has real resonance, her grappling with meaninglessness so meaningful, and yes, this is a book that ends with hope, which is definitely why I like it so much. But it’s also a really compelling depiction of the experience of mental illness, which was important to Austin, she writes, so that some readers will finally see themselves and that others might finally understand.