Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead, by Emily Austin.
Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead, by Emily Austin.
REVIEW:
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead – Emily Austin (Atlantic Books, $32.99) Reviewed by Louise Ward, Wardini Books
I am the kind of person who immediately picked up this book based on its title. If you're not, bear with me, because this novel is very sweet and veryfunny.
This is a story about a highly anxious young women named Gilda. She lives independently in the city and has just lost her job at a book shop because she didn't turn up for days on end, confirming her opinion of herself as unreliable and useless. In reality, Gilda is incredibly depressed, worrying ceaselessly about her brother's drink problem, the neighbour's cat (missing after a house fire), the health and safety of her fellow apartment dwellers and many other things. She comes from a family who view mental distress as a shameful stain, to be denied. Her panic attacks send her frequently to the hospital with chest pains and breathing problems and at the end of it all she says: "I'm fine."
Gilda knows she needs help and musters the energy to leave her neglected nest to attend a therapy session at a local church, overcoming her paranoia that it's a ploy to lure her into their ranks. She meets the church's priest, Father Jeff, who assumes she has responded to an advertisement for a new secretary. She gets the job, mainly because Jeff is so impressed she knows what the internet is. But here's the problem — Gilda is a gay atheist whose girlfriend's name is Eleanor, and St Rigobert's is huge, and gothic, and Catholic.
The plot is further complicated by a potential murder, that of Gilda's predecessor at the church. She becomes obsessed by it, and as her fragile hold on her thought processes dissolves, makes some terrible moves in her "investigation".
To complicate things further still, a friendly church member sets Gilda up on a date with Giuseppe, a persistent male life coach with verbal diarrhoea. Gilda is an intelligent empath, meaning life is incredibly hard for her. She overthinks everything and is paralysed by her swirling thoughts. The medical profession's inability to see past her assertions that she's "fine" are frustrating, referrals for psychiatric help becoming lost in an overwhelmed system. Gilda's behaviour escalates comically, and tragically, leaving the reader sore of heart for her huge capacity for love, and laughing at her catalogue of errors.
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is an investigation into the sheer craziness of life, how little we are, how large we are, and how good intentions, second chances and kindness will eventually win the day. A delightful read.
