Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily R. Austin

TW: anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide

This book begins with a bang. Literally. Gilda, sitting at a traffic light with her hot coffee, gets rear-ended by a minivan. Next thing she knows, she's covered in scalding hot coffee, she's punched herself in the face thanks to the airbag, and she's driving herself to the hospital. Again.

Gilda is a regular at the hospital. The janitor even knows her name. She can't stop fixating on death, so she goes to the hospital often for...well...everything. Desperate for, something, Gilda goes to a local Catholic church that offers free therapy. Suddenly, our atheist-lesbian-obsessed-with-death Gilda is hired to replace the receptionist; the beloved and recently deceased Grace.

Now she's stuck in a job she barely knows how to do. She's hiding the fact that she's seeing someone of the same sex, pretending that she knows anything about Catholicism, and ignoring the growing pile of dishes she just can't find the energy to clean. All the while, she can't remember when she washed her hair, worries that her brother is going to wind up dead in a ditch because of his drinking, and imagining a million different ways to die.

I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting going into this book. Somehow I got the impression it would be hilarious? However, as a sufferer of anxiety most of my life, I found very little of it amusing. I tried. I could tell when something was meant to be funny, but I seldom chuckled cause I knew what she was feeling. I spent the whole book feeling sorry for Gilda and screaming at different characters to just DO something for her. It showed me just how hard it can be to get the help we need, tragically, most of the time. I found the book heartbreaking, impossibly relatable, but rarely funny. I did like Gilda very much. As is often the case, I just wanted someone to SEE her, really SEE her. Does it happen? I leave it to you to find out. I found the book to be a worthwhile look at living with crippling anxiety and depression and how to not go about living with it without getting help.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free, eARC of this novel, received in exchange for an honest review.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

by Emily R. Austin

Published July 6, 2021 by Atria Books

Hardcover, 256 pages