Because of her death obsession, Gilda frequents the emergency room with varying diseases and symptoms that lead to death. If this book were made into a film, TV series, or play, who would your dream cast for the characters in the book be? I do not think that I considered writing her from another perspective, and I think this story is best suited to this perspective, but it is interesting to consider how a different approach might have impacted the story. A little background, Gilda is a lesbian (Catholics aren’t welcoming to the gay/queer community), and she is NOT Catholic, in fact she’s a proud atheist.

While it is breezily written and is easy to read, it deals with the serious subject matter of mental illness. They leave her unable to do dishes or shower, they cause her to obsess over things she can’t control (like the missing cat), and they often cause her to break into tears or have panic attacks at inconvenient times.

But Gilda just doesn’t want Rosemary to be sad that Grace is dead, so she maintains the mirage that Grace is alive and well. Through the inner dialogue of Gilda, our painfully human heroine, Austin connects us with the best and worst parts of being a person while reminding us that even our darkest moments can lead to extraordinary revelations. Eleanor asks her questions about Gilda, and Gilda become suspicious that these are phishing questions. We’re born into a losing struggle and, like Gilda in this book, it can oftentimes all become too much.

Gilda is odd and a little off-center, and doesn’t seem to ‘blend in,’ not that she’s ever known others to take the time to understand her. I can understand the reasoning: the book is written from the perspective of someone with a fragmented mind. Her situation is complicated by her chronic anxiety, depression, and hypochondriasis, which land her in the local ER so often that she is essentially a celebrity there, even to the janitor. She lost her job because she frequently slept in and missed her shifts or the effort of getting up was more than she could manage.As you can tell, a lot is going on with Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead to varying degrees of success. ISBN: 9781838950088 Fans of Exciting Times will devour this funny and original literary debut about the unintentional consequences of anxiety and the relentless pressures of modern life, starring the most unforgettable literary creation since Eleanor Oliphant and Fleabag. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Filling in following the mysterious death of her elderly predecessor, Grace, Gilda finds herself spinning tale after tale to keep the people around her happy. A witty and macabre story about a character who is struggling to find herself in this world and wants nothing more than for her ruminating thoughts on death to stop.

In doing so, Austin provides the reader with a birds-eye-view of what it is like to be anxious and depressed.

Austin has the reader inside Gilda’s head and she has done an excellent job at portraying anxiety through Gilda’s thoughts. It’s not the most obvious job – she’s queer and an atheist for starters – and so in between trying to learn mass, hiding her new maybe-girlfriend and conducting an amateur investigation into Grace’s death, Gilda must avoid revealing the truth of her mortifying existence. Desperate for relief from her anxious mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local church and finds herself abruptly hired to replace the deceased receptionist Grace. All the while Gilda finds herself spiraling deeper and deeper into apathy and depression as she struggles to find meaning in a world that ends in the blackness of death.