Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead: Are You Okay?

‘Are you okay?’

It is a question that Gilda, the main character and narrator of Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, is asked a lot. She’s asked it by people at work. She’s asked it by her maybe-girlfriend. She is asked it by her brother, the receptionist at the hospital, the janitor, the nurse. A lot of people ask Gilda if she is okay, but few of them seem to actually care about the answer. If they did, perhaps they’d know sooner just how depressed, anxious and detached from the world Gilda actually is.

Gilda, twenty-seven and extremely mentally fragile, is depressed and anxious, suffering from panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, and obsessive behaviour. She is obsessed with death; her own, those of the people she loves, the cat across the street, her childhood rabbit. When she loses her job and accidentally ends up as a receptionist at a Catholic Church – despite being a lesbian atheist – she becomes obsessed with the maybe-murder of the sweet old lady who held the post before she did. In the meantime, she is trying to deal with parents who refuse to see that Eli, her younger brother, has a serious substance abuse problem as well as his own myriad of mental health problems, and juggle her relationship with her maybe-girlfriend.

Gilda’s story is, to put it lightly, a lot.

If that quick plot summary sounds a bit heavy then you aren’t wrong, but you should know that Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead is also very funny. The humour is pitch black, of course – think Fleabag – but it does provide some moments of relief in a narrative that would otherwise be almost unbearably heavy. Gilda’s employment in the Catholic Church is, at times, a good old-fashioned farce as she tries her best to blend in, despite not even knowing that stealing communion wafers is probably not a good idea. As it is, the novel is still quite difficult to read in places but the humour does some heavy lifting.

At the most basic, this is a novel about mental health. Aside from Gilda’s many problems, there is the fact that Eli abuses alcohol and is probably also depressed. Her dad has clearly been depressed in the past and may still be. Austin doesn’t shy away from the depicting any of this for her readers; Gilda’s intrusive thoughts are genuinely frightening at times, and the depiction of panic attacks are so well drawn that at times it feels voyeuristic to be experiencing them alongside Gilda. It isn’t really hard to see why Gilda is so obsessed with death when her panic attacks make her feels as though she is dying; her constant visits to the emergency room might be frustrating for staff in the hospital, but if Gilda feels as though she is dying every time then can you blame her? Austin treats all of these issues very fairly; although Gilda knows on some level that she is being paranoid, Austin doesn’t judge her for it.

And another thing worth mentioning, I think, is how good a person Gilda is. She feels as though she isn’t very good, but she spends the novel desperate to find the cat, Mittens, who went missing when the house across the street caught fire. Long after everyone else stopped looking, she still went searching for him. She was very kind to her rabbit, Flop, when she was a kid. She’s loving and as gentle as she knows how to be with her brother, Eli, even when he doesn’t deserve it. She corresponds with the elderly friend of the dead receptionist because she can’t bear the thought that the old lady will be sad. Austin presents us with a character who struggles so much with herself and her place in the world, but underneath it all she wants us to know how good Gilda is.

Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a hard read, but also a very kind portrait of how mental health problems might cause someone to struggle – but it doesn’t define who they are.

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