A stunning debut that alternates between being laugh-out-loud funny, quirky, and depressing, which I think also sums up the point of the story. Gilda is an anxious young woman who is known by name at the local Emergency department, is referred for therapy and ends up working at a Catholic church despite its conflict with her sexual orientation and religious beliefs. Perhaps she's too nice or too worried about how it will affect others, but she bumbles her way into a first class mess, and I really felt for her, to the point of tears. This is a unique story that is well worth reading, it will remain in my thoughts for some time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for allowing me to read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

The way that anxiety manifests itself in the main character Gilda is all too relatable! Gilda and the people in her life are written in a way that is wholy human, making her story as easy to digest as a conversation with a friend. I became so engrossed in the story that I read it in only a few hours, and even despite spending only a short time with it felt a deep connection to the novel!

Quirky and fun I really enjoyed this book! I was able to relate with Gilda on many levels! I found myself laughing out loud, Gilda a complete mess at times is trying to get her life on track. The humor can take a darker turn but I enjoyed where the story went and would highly recommend checking it out!

Sending a sincere thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book was laugh out loud funny-just the escape I needed as I waited for my place on the Covid vaccine waitlist. Although the main character is dealing with severe depression and anxiety, which some readers may find a trigger, Gilda is endearing in her approach and perspective on a number of increasingly ridiculous situations she finds herself in. I can't wait to read more by this author.

Many thanks to Atria Books and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

Unfortunately, I did not like this book. As someone with clinical anxiety disorder and panic attacks, I thought I would be able to connect to the story better. The writing of this book and the internal narrative of Gilda gave me anxiety. As a person with mental health problems, this wasn’t funny to me. It felt like a girl who desperately needs some help.

This is an odd book. It was described to me as oddball in the vein of Fleabag (the tv show by Phoebe Waller-Bridge). It is that a little but more oddball as in a crazy main character.

Gilda sees things, thinks she always hurt, forgets to eat, is very detached from her family and life in general. One day she sees a flyer for a therapy group, only to find that it's at a Catholic church and their receptionist just died. Needing a job, Gilda becomes their receptionist and does not tell them she is an atheist lesbian. She then become obsessed with finding out how her predecessor died.

The writing is hard to get used to. It's a version of stream of consciousness or just the rambling thoughts of a person on the verge of insanity. The thing that kind of saves this book is that Gilda is funny. The humor in this is what helped me stay reading, even when I didn't really understand what she was saying or where she was going with her thoughts.

If you want something different and cynical, then this book might be right for you. I enjoyed it in a different way that I thought I would, but it is worth a read.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advance copy for review.

This book is awesome and incredible and fantastic! It might not suit the readers at the community college where I am the librarian, but I will recommend it to other public libraries. Thanks for the review copy!

I tend to avoid books with quirky, upbeat heroines, and initially I was a bit fearful that Gilda, the main character in Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead, would be one of those plucky, always-positive characters I dislike. But that is definitely not a description of Gilda. She is a gay, atheist woman in her late 20s who is suffering from profound anxiety and depression. So much so, in fact, that she does not go to her job, gets fired, stumbles into another job as a receptionist at a Catholic church while looking for therapy, and then barely hangs on to that job while she stacks up dirty dishes in her apartment and neglects to shower because it is too much trouble and she just can't see the point.

There are some heartbreaking moments, like this one when Gilda is talking to the priest at the Catholic church:

"Don't worry, Jeff, life is meaningless; it's strange and inexplicable that we exist to begin with. We are all basically dead already in the grand scheme of things, and our feelings of sadness are pointless — they are just how our meat sacks react to the chemicals in our bodies."

The facts that Gilda's countless ER visits for anxiety attacks don't seem to result in the help she so desperately needs, and her parents are choosing to ignore everything despite alarming evidence to the contrary are equally heartbreaking. Mental health issues clearly run deep in Gilda's family.

"I glance at Eli, note that he's half asleep, and whisper: "I think he might be having some mental health issues. I think he should see someone about it—" My mom bats her hand in the air as if to swat my idea out of the room."

If you read Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead looking for an upbeat, funny novel, you might be disappointed. There are humorous and poignant moments. But if you are reading it for a genuine portrayal of depression, you may find it as honest and rewarding as I did.

Thank you to Atria and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of the book.

Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin (coming 6 July 2021) is the story of twentysomething Gilda, an atheist lesbian who has anxiety that profoundly affects the way she tries to muddle through life. It seems like every time she tries to get help, she is drawn into something else that she doesn’t intend because she also has boundary issues.

After having been in a car accident, Gilda drives herself to the emergency room, where we find that she is a frequent visitor because of panic attacks. She was fired from her job at a bookstore for missing too much work, because she can’t get out of bed. When a house near her apartment catches fire and the cat, Mittens, is lost, Gilda sets out to search for him after going to get a fire extinguisher, cleaning her lint trap, unplugging her stove, and throwing out all the candles in her apartment.

She finds an ad for free mental health services and at the address, finds an old gothic church. The priest, Jeff, thinks she’s there for the clerical job and Gilda doesn’t tell him otherwise. Of course, he assumes she’s Catholic and not an atheist lesbian. She needs the job, so she plays the role and works at the recently-departed Grace Moppet’s desk. After checking the church’s email, she finds a number of emails from Grace’s friend Rosemary, who doesn’t know that Grace is dead.

Her younger brother, Eli, an art-school dropout living at home with their overbearing parents, is having trouble with drinking, and Gilda doesn’t quite know how to deal with that. She attends Catholic mass for the first time and is terrified she is revealed as a fraud. She won’t return texts during work from the woman she’s seeing, because she is afraid they can tell she’s doing something gay. And then a woman she meets at a baptism wants to set her up with her brother-in-law, Giuseppe, who starts texting her, and she doesn’t feel like she can explain why she doesn’t want to go out with him, because she will lose her job.

After Gilda replies to Rosemary’s emails as Grace, the police start asking about Grace, because a local nurse has confessed to killing many of her elderly patients. Gilda is already obsessed with death as part of her anxiety, and being in close proximity to Catholic culture and replacing someone who was possibly murdered doesn’t help. Her brother is spiraling out of control and won’t return her texts, and Giuseppe is really persistent about getting to know her.

After cutting herself and going to the emergency room (again), Gilda finally gets on antidepressants. But they don’t start working right away, and she goes through a very dark time. And the police begin investigating her because they find out that she was impersonating Grace and emailing Rosemary.

In some ways, it reminded me of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, but Gilda was more concerned about other people’s feelings than Eleanor was. And I appreciated that Eleanor’s transformation to becoming more mentally healthy was facilitated by therapy. Gilda didn’t actually get to therapy despite trying, but I wish she had. Or maybe Austin’s intent was to show that becoming involved in the life of the church was a kind of therapy?

Also, it seemed that Gilda was really, really struggling and suicidal, and then, she just wasn’t. I wished that there had been more of a rationale or baby steps for how she got better.

While I wouldn’t consider Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead to be explicitly fat-positive, it is weight-neutral. At one point, Gilda is with the girl she’s seeing, Eleanor, and notes that she won’t let her touch her stomach, even though Eleanor is thinner than Gilda. So then Gilda starts thinking about how strange it is that we waste any time thinking about our bodies, our skin, or how our fat is distributed. Later, she thinks about how humans look like pig-apes, uglier than apes because we don’t have fur, and that a lot of naked bodies are unsightly. So Austin is clearly aware of the pitfall of our culture’s preoccupation with bodies and I think she made a welcome choice to avoid diet culture and fatphobia.

Overall, I really liked it and kept reading because I wanted to make sure that Gilda was OK. She is the friend you know is a mess, but she has a good heart and you want the best for her. Kudos to Emily Austin for steering clear of fatphobia and thanks to NetGalley for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review. Mark your calendars for its release in July 2021!

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. The author's ability to describe anxiety was almost anxiety-inducing in me. I would rather have focused more on the central mystery through the eyes of the anxious narrator, rather than so much of her surrounding anxiety.

The name, cover, and description of the novel led me to believe that this was going to be a slightly dark with some deadpan humour story. But that was not the case. The premise seems promising, but overall it just felt depressing. Seems like a missed opportunity to turn it into something more enjoyable.

This book was a sharp blend of humor and tense darkness. I really enjoyed the conversational tone and the fragmented sections of thought carried throughout the story; Gilda's voice was unique and anxiety-inducing in a really successful way. I have to say that there's a big TW for suicidal thoughts, depictions, and tendencies. The plot itself felt jumbled and it was hard to feel connected to anything happening in the murder subplot. I loved the concept of the emails between Rosemary and Gilda, but it felt like they fell out of focus in the story when I expected them to be a much bigger piece. This was a quick and emotional read that I think could have been elevated by taking out the murder plot. With the focus on mental health, religion, and sexuality, the rest of the plot had plenty to work with.

(Thank you Atria Books for the e-galley. Pub date: July 6, 2021) This character study is also a page-turner. I desperately wanted to know what would happen to the main character, Gilda, who has depression and anxiety. The story reads like vignettes that, together, allow the reader to piece together Gilda's story, including family issues and things from her past that contribute to some of her problems in the present day. There is dry, and often sad, humor in the book. It is remarkable the situations that Gilda finds herself in. She is gay and an atheist, but she finds herself working at a Catholic Church, posing as straight and Catholic. She learns that the church reception before her died, which not only contributes to Gilda's anxiety but also leads Gilda's obsession with the circumstances surrounding Gilda's death. Overall, I enjoyed this book. It seemed like an accurate portrayal of how difficult it is from someone with anxiety and depression to function, complete everyday tasks, and interact with others. I only wish that more time would have been spent on Gilda confronting certain situations and people at the end.

Review copied from my Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3852624173

I soon realized this was not a good fit for me, although I am sure it will be for some of my library patrons. Thank you for the opportunity to review it!

Just did not work for me. It becomes just slower, with no speed or much reason. I did try to get thru the book, but after halfway, I just had to give up. I was excited to get the book, sounded very interesting. But, it was not happening.

Life is filled with many uncertainties and oddities that may raise questions for those with overactive minds that spiral, which is explored through the perspective of one woman in Emily Austin’s Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead.

Gilda is an atheist lesbian in her late twenties who has frequent, panicked thoughts about death and dying, which often sends her to the emergency room, where the staff have become familiar with her. After finding a flyer for some free therapy at a nearby Catholic church, Gilda quickly finds herself with an administrative assistant job at the church after Father Jeff assumed she was there to interview. Too nervous and embarrassed to correct his assumption, and the fact that she does need a job, Gilda replaces the former assistant and recently deceased Grace, while trying to learn the Catholic mass traditions, maintain her relationship with her new girlfriend, and manage her apartment that’s frequently in a state of disarray. While sorting through the church’s inbox, Gilda finds messages from one of Grace’s friends but is unable to bring herself to let her know of Grace’s death and Gilda resumes the correspondence as if she were Grace; however, Grace’s death seems suspicious so the police investigation may drive Gilda to confess her truth, eventually.

Through quick wit and dark humor, the story develops rapidly, presenting as part comedy of errors, part serious contemplations, and a dash of mystery. The voice of this novel is easy to relate with and many of the thoughts explored within Gilda’s active mind are ones that might frequently arise for anyone with an overactive, and curious, mind that has a tendency to fixate. Issues of mental health are prevalent in this story, but the way that they’re portrayed and subsequently handled by the characters (namely ignoring the neon signs for help) may be frustrating to experience as a reader as it doesn’t adequately address the issue; however, doing so in this manner does vividly evoke the general struggle that these characters are working through and the social stigma associated with them. Constructing the narrative from events currently being experienced and recollections of past, the story conjures the out-of-body sensation that Gilda notes at times as the text jumps between the various parts of her sad, macabre, and fragmented mind.

Overall, I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars.

*I received a copy of this book from the Publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was given the opportunity to read and review this book through Net Galley and I am so glad! The story sucked you in and you'll find yourself thinking about the characters long after you finish the book. Can't wait to read more by this author!!

I thought by the title and the cheery cover this would be funnier than it turned out to be. I was expecting dark humor, but this is mostly just dark. Depressing. Bleak. Lots of characters in this novel have mental health and substance abuse issues. 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. Despite being so depressed she can’t wash a single dish, she manages to date a woman, and, when a parishioner sets her up with her male family member, Gilda initially puts off going on a date, but she ultimately goes out several times with a man she doesn’t like at all, even if she were straight.

There were a few funny moments of fish-out-of-water humor as Gilda tries to understand the rules of the Catholic religion. Reading the Bible she thinks: “I can’t help noting the use of the male pronouns. I wonder whether this directive applies to me. Am I subject to a womanly loophole? Whoever wrote this book prioritized men so much, he forgot about the other half of humanity. ‘If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They must be put to death.’ . . . I’m disappointed God is so homophobic he forgot about lesbians, but I guess I would rather be forgotten than put to death.”

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review this novel, which RELEASES JULY 6, 2021.

I was excited to have the chance to read Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead but it just really wasn't for me. I found it to be somewhat funny at times but mostly really dark and sad. The unrelenting profanity was a distraction for me and did not help advance the story at all.

A sincere thank you to Netgalley and Simon and Schuster for providing a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoy a little dark humour, but unfortunately Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead took that concept a too far for me to enjoy. I realized pretty quickly into the book that our main character, Gilda, has some serious mental issues that have not been diagnosed. Suddenly, nothing in the book felt quite as funny, because we are supposed to be laughing at the inner monologue of a woman who needs help. There is some quick wit in Emily Austin’s writing, but it felt lost because Gilda seems so helpless and hurting. I understand why some people would find this book funny, but to me it was really dark and sad.

Thanks to Netgalley, Atria Books and Emily Austin for providing a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.