Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

A book that will take you inside an anxious mind, will acquaint you with the horrors of overthinking & constant worry, a story that will change the way you look at anxiety and mental health problems. - Simran Nasir

Meet Gilda, a 20 something gay woman living by herself in her not so tidy apartment, who is consumed by a recurring thought, “When Am I Going to Die? How Am I Going to Die? What Will Happen to me after I die? What will happen to my loved ones?”

She finds herself halting at every turn, at every instance and deliberating the meaning of existence and what lies beyond that. Amid her thoughts & messy life filled with questions, she finds herself accidently working at a Catholic Church as a receptionist. Hiding her identity & harboring the feeling of guilt, she devotees herself to the job she cannot afford to lose.

“My quietness is a consequence of my deeply entrenched nihilism. I don’t believe there is any real value in my or anyone else’s speaking, and I think that all of human existence is fundamentally unimportant.”

While detailing the theme of anxiety, these 250 odd pages will enable you to slow down and look at the surroundings, feel every bit of it and notice the orderliness in the daily chaotic hustle. Gilda is moved by the okay-ness of the world and is astonished by events as plain as a woman walking down the road, the clock ticking & following its course. Such stops will give you a taste of what is it like to truly belong to a moment, belong to all the wonders & questions it comes up with, live in the moment, solely for that moment. However, she also thinks about that how all these moments and all the creatures that it holds are destined for their ultimate certainty, death.

The events will push you into a state of discomfort & give you a reality check & make you question.

Are we not all just made of flesh & bone, only here to die?

Are we not all breathing every second, just to run out of it someday?

Are we not a selfish species finding ways to succeed & own material possessions, only to fade away?

Are we not all in a perpetual funeral procession from the time we are born?

Are all the journeys we take, are not the journeys to our graves?

Between panicking & showing up at emergency rooms in the middle of the night & pretending to be a straight woman at her job, she is perplexed by the choices she has to make on a daily basis. While she resolves to find out about the suspicious death of her predecessor at the job, her anxiety worsens & makes her wonder the insignificance of the human race to invent crimes like murder & theft.

The pointlessness of our existence, the idea of being with our loved ones only to painfully separate with them someday, the power play of physics & chemistry of holding the world together, when all it will take is one equation going wrong to disrupt the entire universe and wondering if we will be caught in the middle of the destruction, Austin, stitches complex theories in a very simple way to give out a larger message from her book.

A dark comedy, that also has a thrill of a murder mystery within, this debut novel by Emily Austin is uniquely wholesome but relatable in every sense.