By Kaylie Seed
Content warning: mental illness, suicide, suicidal ideation, eating disorder, alcoholism, homophobia
Canadian author Emily R. Austin has made a splash with her debut novel Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead (Everyone in This Room) where she explores mental illness through the eyes of Gilda, an atheist lesbian who ends up working in a Catholic Church only to impersonate the previous receptionist just because she wants to make everyone happy. Austin has crafted 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. Everyone in This Room also looks at family dynamics, the healthcare system, and how the general population perceives mental illness.
Quirky and unique, Everyone in This Room explores how mental illness can completely take over our lives and how it not only affects the person who is dealing with it but how it affects everything around them as well. Gilda seeks help from the hospital where she is either turned away or not given the proper referral time and time again. This is a perfect example of how mental illness is treated a lot of the time. Gilda’s family doesn’t want to discuss the mental illness that seems to be running rampant among them, which is yet again a great example of how our mental health can be perceived by our family members. Austin has the reader inside Gilda’s head, and she has done an excellent job at portraying anxiety through Gilda’s thoughts. Gilda is a very relatable character because the reader gets to experience her every thought and a lot of readers may see themselves in her.
Austin also includes alcoholism, family dysfunction, and homophobia throughout Everyone in This Room. While a lot of the themes present in her debut novel are thought-provoking, Austin manages to balance the heavy with some seriously dry humour. While not all readers may appreciate the style of humour used, it works well for this story, paralleling nicely with the heavy themes. The story itself is laid out in a way that may feel choppy to readers but again, it works. Austin’s writing style is unique and manages to keep the reader flying through pages, needing to know what’s going to happen next. If Everyone in This Room is any indication of the storyteller that Austin is, then we can’t wait to see what she writes next.
Thank you, Simon & Schuster Canada for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!