Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead review: Is there hope in this harsh world?

There’s nothing more grounding yet tragic than experiencing the lives of others through literature, as it enchants me how a single person can concoct whole societies and populate them with people with their own personalities, quirks, and histories. I love to lose myself in these characters’s lives and maybe even pick apart aspects of them I can relate to. This is exactly what I did in ‘Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead’ by Emily Austin, a character-driven narrative about a woman obsessed with how fleeting her existence is and how we are all on a downward spiral to death. A seemingly depressing take on the world around us, it is Austin’s intimate yet playful understanding of how hopeless the world can seem to a depressed individual that touched me in terms of how my experience could be understood.

Most of the decisions Gilda makes within the novel are questionable in practice but always innocent in heart, an underlying hope that constantly contrasts her harrowing outlook in the novel. There is a struggle in her decisions, as primarily seen in her interaction with Rosemary. Gilda replaces the late Grace, the receptionist of the Catholic church, and finds out through her emails that her close friend Rosemary doesn’t know of her passing. Slowly being crushed by the thought of Rosemary’s despair, she decides to impersonate Grace. On the surface, this decision is quite silly and chaotic. What right does Gilda have to withhold this kind of information? But it’s her ulterior motive—to shield the elderly woman from grief—that encompasses Gilda’s strive to do good. However, it’s this grasping at hope that is inevitably crushed by an ongoing suspicion of how Grace died. The last act of the book sees Gilda being interrogated and cornered as the police struggle to think of why she would impersonate Grace. This throwing it back in her face symbolises what Austin wants us to feel in this book: that the world may knock you down again and again, but it’s a human’s ingrained hope for the better that can steer us away from the darkness of mental illness. The arc is tied up nicely in Rosemary meeting with Gilda, stating that if Grace were alive, she would find this ‘hilarious’ and easy-going attitude that feeds Gilda that hope again.

Religion has proven to me to be a prevalent theme in queer literature due to its overbearing presence in our world and to contrast the modern exploration of sexuality with the traditional rigidity of religion. I have seen this in recent fiction such as ‘EiTRWSBD’ and ‘Milkfed’ by Melissa Broder and ‘Call Me by Your Name’ by Andre Aciman, each presenting Catholicism and Judaism, respectively. So why? Generally, these books use religion to highlight how the world is changing and how the past and tradition can be harmful. Specifically, I think Austin used Catholicism to play into the fear of being accepted; being a lesbian in a Catholic setting is a condition that heightens this fear, playing into how Gilda views the world as cruel. Gilda is struggling to find her place in society, so she accidentally tries to force herself into her job in the church. She meets a range of characters, from Jeff the priest to Barney the volunteer and her fake boyfriend Giuseppe. Focussing on the more chaotic of the three, Giuseppe, the purpose of his character is to highlight the toxic present-day positive mentality. Specific beliefs the character imposes on Gilda are the power of the individual and how we are the only ones who can fix and control our lives. This burden of being your own saviour is often damaging when a person does not fully understand the scope of mental illness. Simply not being strong-willed enough is a valid reason why people can’t get out of bed in the morning. Don’t get me wrong. Depression is an intricately difficult topic that a lot of people struggle to comprehend, but how Gisueppe ultimately fails is his ignorance and refusal to actually see Gilda as an individual and to understand how she thinks and feels. We are all different in how we view the world, and every view should be acknowledged.

This novel is chaotically intimate in how it understands depression in an individual. The book doesn’t just end with Gilda being fixed or having some ground-breaking revelation on what needs to be done; Austin ends with two important things. A list of simple menial tasks that Gilda carries out, a simplicity that represents the beginning of Gilda’s journey to tackling her depression. And her finding Mittens, a cat that has been lost for most of the narrative, where Gilda always assumes the worst. Mittens, as silly as it seems, symbolises the hope that there is good, even if it’s only as small as a list and a cat.