Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

Product Information

Gilda herself is so depressed she stopped going to work, thus losing her job, so when she’s nearly broke and stumbles upon a job opening at a Catholic church, she pretends to be a good Catholic instead of the Atheist lesbian that she is.

I was utterly charmed by the kind-hearted but morbidly anxious Gilda, a woman whose self-conscious overthinking leads her into the oddest of predicaments. Emily Austin's protagonist, Gilda - an atheist, animal-loving lesbian who has worried about death since childhood-spoke directly to the deepest, darkest parts of myself. the grasp that emily austin has on what it is like to be a human being who feels alone, even when surrounded by other people; what it is like to care about others far more than you care about yourself; what it is like to be in limbo, waiting for things to make sense, but getting stuck in a cursed spiral of thinking and loving and existing?Q: Gilda’s fascination with death—both her preoccupation with how everyone will someday be dead (hence the title) and her fear that it could come for anyone at any moment—is so prominent throughout the book. One of my favorite lines: “I’m starting to doubt my atheism because this might be proof that God exists and hates me. I do not think that I considered writing her from another perspective, and I think this story is best suited to this perspective, but it is interesting to consider how a different approach might have impacted the story. As with all the other alienated millennial women populating these novels, Gilda seems unable to perform even the most basic of tasks.

For fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Halle Butler , this is a darkly funny, surprisingly tender, and weirdly charming coming-of-age novel about a young woman with so much anxiety she'd rather lie than risk hurting anyone's feelings. Even her parents don’t seem to care enough to actually listen to her, still focused on the time she did this or that when she was too young to know better. It turns out that when she shows up in the Emergency Room, the nurses and even a janitor all know her, and she has been here many times before with seemingly minor complaints — meaning that they treat her condescendingly, though this aspect is handled with humour. I thought for sure when I picked this book up it would be right up my alley as and I would be able to relate to the main character's struggles with anxiety issues. Q: Why did you choose to have Gilda’s parents be particularly unresponsive to the pain of their children?

But (when you think about it) if there is no reason to be happy then (existentially speaking) there’s also no reason to be unhappy: because life is pointless and with no inherit meaning we can CHOOSE to be happy (mental illness aside).

The interplay between queerness and mental health is a rich palette for painting a narrative, and through Gilda’s eyes, Austin lets us all feel the push and pull of what we know and what we think we know about ourselves and the world around us. It’s impossible not to root for her as she navigates love, religion, mental health and everything in between.

This shows that many health professionals don’t know how to deal properly with people who are suffering from a mental illness, which is a truth to which this novel speaks. Every seemingly mundane action Gilda makes has to be mentioned, so that we have many lines such as these: I drink, I get up, I put the cup on the counter, I move my hand, I walk, I sit, I blink, I look down/up.