Dear Reader Reviews

by Emily Austin

Dear Reader,

If you, too, struggle with anxiety I would advise you to read this book at your own risk. It felt like Austin had peeked into my brain, took copious notes on exactly how my anxious mind jumps from one worst case scenario to the next, and then wrote a book. I loved it.

In Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily Austin takes us into the life and mind of Gilda, a clinically depressed lesbian who unwittingly got a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church. In the midst of her own existential crisis, she finds herself obsessing over Grace, the elderly woman who worked for the church before dying under mysterious circumstances.

Gilda is a depressed, anxious, suicidal hypochondriac who frequents the hospital emergency room and is struggling to maintain a relationship with a woman she met on a dating app, Eleanor. She has parents who are oblivious to her mental health struggles and her younger brother’s alcoholism and gender dysphoria.

Austin takes us into the struggles of Gilda’s daily life with a voice that is somehow energetic while being rife with gallows humor. Gilda has a morbid fixation with death, thinking almost constantly about the inevitable demise of herself and others. She sees the possibility of death in everything, Final Destination scenarios playing out in her imagination almost constantly.

She pilfers food from the church, goes out with a man who is oblivious to the fact that she is gay, thinks constantly about the pet rabbit she had as a child, and forgets much of what happens in her day to day life, hours lost to her spiraling imagination.

It turns out the crackers I stole are the body of Christ. After eating more than half the bag, I googled the cracker brand and learned that I paired marble Cracker Barrel cheese with God’s transubstantiated body.

While Gilda is looking for Mittens, the cat belonging to her neighbors whose house burned down in a fire, trying to make ends meet in her rapidly deteriorating apartment, and navigating dating with depression, she’s also learning about the Catholic church in an attempt to keep her atheism from her kindly employer. Austin’s background in religious studies informs Gilda’s dry observations about the church where she’s employed.

Austin manages to consistently bring a touch of humor and lightness into the darkness of Gilda’s socially anxious, people pleasing, death fixated mind. Her voice is raw and relatable, and while it hit a little too close to home at times, it was an excellent read. I look forward to reading more by Austin and hope she continues to write with the same cunning clarity she brought to the resurrection of Gilda.

Rating: 3.5/5