Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, by Emily Austin

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★★ (4.8 of 5)

Full Title: Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead
Author: Emily Austin
Year: 2021 (mine was library hardcover)
Pages: 243
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Atria Books (Simon & Schuster)
ISBN 978-1-9821-6735-6 (hardcover)

Summary

Gilda, the first-person narrator, is a 20-something atheist lesbian with a plethora of mental health issues that I don’t have the vocabulary to describe. (The blurb on Goodreads uses “panicky mind” and the front jacket flap of the book says “anxious mind”.) Armed with a flyer offering free counseling, which she badly needs, Gilda goes to the address only to learn it’s a Catholic church. Father Jeff assumes she’s there for a job interview (the church recently “lost” its aging secretary) and Gilda is too socially awkward to correct him and ends up accepting the job, which is something else she badly needs. As one can imagine, this leads to plenty of awkward situations because she has to pretend to be a Catholic since everyone assumes she is and they’ll feel betrayed if she comes clean.

The book is mostly vignettes from Gilda’s life — all the way back to childhood sometimes, but mostly in or near the present. (Eventually the book reveals her age, but we know she is young throughout because she mentions texting and otherwise using cell phones when she was a child.) All of the vignettes are short and snappy.

The Good

While contemplating this review, I felt like saying things like “Emily Austin is my spirit animal” — but I don’t know exactly what that means. I also couldn’t tell whether the author experiences life this way or merely imagined it for her main character. But it felt like she was inside my mind. Ninety-five percent of the things Gilda thinks about, I think about, or at least have in the past. For example, a couple of times she wondered if she was a robot — I have entire journal entries from my early twenties wondering the same thing. She regularly considers her personal insignifance relative to the Universe which makes her feel like nothing matters — this is something that crosses my mind daily. She wonders if she is even the same person that she was as a child — not because “people change” but because the literal atoms in our bodies have mostly been replaced over that time. (Some of the current atoms in my body belonged to other living things earlier this year, and before that were part of streams or farm soil or maybe even space dust — 5,200 tons of which falls to Earth every single year. Ninety-eight percent of our bodies’s atoms are replaced yearly.) She thinks about what cats think or about whether she is impersonating herself and randomly mentions this to other people at inappropriate times without realizing until too late what the other person might think of it. (“I’m a life force contained in the deformed body of a baby”, she thinks.) I won’t give every example here because I’m certain that quoting all the text of an entire book in a review is asinine.

But at least once per page, I wondered if I was in the book or if it was about me. Maybe in the future, I will finally think of the exact best way to describe what goes on in my mind and then I will time-travel back to 2021 in the body of a Canadian woman and write this book. No, sorry, that wasn’t part of the review, it was just something that suddenly went through my mind.

Gilda regularly keeps thoughts to herself because she’s worried what people will think, but those turn out to be normal thoughts at which no one would bat an eye, and reveals thoughts that maybe she should have kept to herself. I identify with this very strongly. Even if I don’t do it anymore, thanks to years of training, I daily worry that it will happen.

I could go on, but I feel like I’m misrepresenting the book. It’s funnier than this, starker than this, deeper than this. I am doing it a disservice while trying to say how much of a service this book did for me. It was a huge relief to read it, to know that even if the author doesn’t personally experience thought this way, that at least she could imagine it and therefore it isn’t quite as weird as I sometimes think.

Points Off For...

I have a few very minor complaints about the book. (1) The first-person narrator doesn’t reveal her name until page 28. I have read books in which the first-person narrator never reveals his or her name, and in a few stories, the name is supposed to be a surprise at some point, but this was neither of those. I think the author simply forgot to reveal Gilda’s name until then. (2) The ending wasn’t quite as strong as I’d hoped; it felt a little like each of the problems that had built up throughout the story just fizzled out on their own accord. On one hand, this is realistic; problems often sort themselves or fade away in real life. On the other hand, it isn’t normal for novels to end this way.

Conclusion

Probably this book isn’t for everyone. I got it because my wife was halfway through and decided not to finish it. When she tried to explain why, I knew almost immediately that I would like it. For her, it was depressing. For me it was like taking a deep breath of fresh mountain air after weeks of being trapped underneath a pile of old mattresses.

I also can’t stop thinking about how this book had 243 pages, which is the exact same number of pages as the previous book I read, which was nothing like this. I wonder what the odds are of that happening. I don’t think it’s ever happened before that two books in a row had the exact same amount of pages. (When I write these reviews, I usually use the html file of my previous review as a template for the next one, replacing each pertinent bit as I scroll down through the file. When I got to the page number line, I had to double-check because the correct number was already there.) The books were published 65 years apart, the first by a man who was the same age then as I am now and the second by a woman whose age is half the number of years between the books. (None of this is important, of course, but the numbers won’t cease presenting themselves to my brain.) And if you add my age to Austin’s age and to Heinlein’s age (when he wrote that book), plus the number of years between the books, and add a random number, say, 48, then you’ll get 243. Exactly.