Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead Review

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A deadpan, deeply sympathetic novel about a depressed lesbian atheist faking her way through a job at a Catholic church, with a narrator readers recognise themselves in, undercut by a bleakness that many expected to be funnier.

Best for: Readers who want literary fiction with a queer narrator and an honest account of anxiety and depression, and who can sit with a looping, ruminative voice rather than a plot that races.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — minimal; not indexed by romance.io)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.83 Goodreads average across 102,531 ratings, with a real split between readers who felt seen and readers who felt dragged down)

Tropes: Anxious narrator, workplace secret, closeted at work, mistaken identity, impersonation by email, dark comedy, dysfunctional family, new relationship, small mystery, standalone.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily R. Austin is a standalone literary dark comedy, first published by Atria in July 2021, in which Gilda — twenty-seven, lesbian, atheist, and unable to stop thinking about death — walks into a Catholic church looking for free therapy and walks out employed as its receptionist, replacing a woman who has recently died and whose life Gilda then starts, quietly and disastrously, to borrow.

It sits at a 3.83 average across 102,531 Goodreads ratings, carries positive notices from Kirkus and The New York Times Book Review, and still ranks among Amazon’s top LGBTQ+ humorous fiction five years on. The reviews split more sharply than that number suggests, and the split is about tone. Both halves of it are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead About?

This is character-driven literary fiction first and a queer novel second, and romance only a distant third. Goodreads readers shelve it as contemporary fiction, LGBT, queer, lesbian and — tellingly — mental health, and StoryGraph readers call it character-driven by a margin of 79% to 1%. The engine is a single consciousness: Gilda’s first-person narration, which circles, catalogues and panics in short sections that jump between conversations and moments.

Gilda’s problem is not a lack of feeling but an excess of it. She is so preoccupied with mortality that she visits the emergency room often enough that the janitor knows her by name, her flat is quietly collapsing, and her parents are too busy managing appearances — including her brother’s drinking — to hear her. What she lacks is anyone who sees her clearly. What the church assumes, from the moment Father Jeff mistakes her for a job candidate, is that she is a practising Catholic with a straight life. The first-person voice lets the book stage both at once: the performance she gives, and the running commentary underneath it.

What Makes This Sapphic Literary Dark Comedy Work

The portrayal of anxiety and depression: The most-praised element by a distance. Reviewers repeatedly say it felt as though the author had read their thoughts, and “relatable” is the word that recurs most.
Gilda’s voice: Deadpan, self-deprecating and kind. Readers love her even when they find her exhausting, and several compare her to Eleanor Oliphant.
The church as a comic setting: An atheist memorising the responses to mass is reliably funny, and Kirkus singles out her bumbling attempts to fit in as the source of the book’s humour.
A queer life that is simply there: Gilda’s sexuality is not the crisis. The strain comes from hiding it at work and from a family that does not listen — the kind of contemporary lesbian life that rarely gets the literary treatment.
Compact length: At 256 pages, readers finish it — StoryGraph’s did-not-finish rate is just 3%.

Book Synopsis

Gilda sees a flyer promising free therapy at a Catholic church and goes, because nothing else is working. She cannot stop thinking about death — hers, everyone’s, the planet’s — and the thoughts arrive faster than she can argue with them. Father Jeff, a gentle priest who assumes she is there about the vacant receptionist job, interviews her before she can explain. She is too embarrassed to correct him. By the end of the conversation, she has the job.

The woman she is replacing, Grace, was the church’s receptionist and has recently died. Grace’s inbox is still active, and one of the messages waiting in it is from an old friend named Rosemary, who does not yet know. Gilda cannot bear to be the one who makes Rosemary sad, so she answers as Grace. Then she answers again. Meanwhile she is learning mass from scratch, hiding the fact that she has just started seeing a woman named Eleanor, and fielding a family that treats her anxiety as a phase and her brother’s drinking as something nobody mentions.

The deception is small and kindly meant, and it keeps growing. When questions begin to surface about how Grace actually died, Gilda finds herself tangled in a life that is not hers, in a building where she cannot be herself, at the very moment someone new is trying to get to know the real version of her. The question the book keeps asking is whether she can let anyone do that.

My Review

The best thing about this novel is that it takes an anxious, depressed mind seriously without making it tragic or cute. Austin writes Gilda’s rumination as it actually feels — repetitive, absurd, exhausting, occasionally beautiful — and she does it in a voice light enough that the weight sneaks up on you. That is why the reviews are full of people saying they felt seen.

The second strength is the premise, which does real work. Putting an atheist lesbian in a parish office is a comic setup, but it is also a precise one: the church is the one place where Gilda is kind, useful and needed, and the one place she cannot tell the truth about herself. The impersonation plot with Grace’s friend grows out of the same impulse — she lies because she wants other people to hurt less. Father Jeff and Eleanor are the two supporting characters readers like most, and both are written with real warmth.

Where it struggles is tone, and this is the dominant complaint rather than my own gripe. The packaging promises a funny book, and a sizeable minority of low-star reviewers say they came for dark comedy and found mostly bleakness. Alongside that sit the structural notes: the stream-of-consciousness chapters feel choppy or tedious to some readers, the supporting cast beyond Jeff and Eleanor is called forgettable or one-dimensional, the mystery around Grace occupies less of the book than the blurb implies, and a few readers found the ending flat. None of that stops people finishing — StoryGraph’s 3% did-not-finish rate is low for a book this divisive — but it does explain the 3.83.

One expectation to reset: this is not a romance, and it is not a comedy in the way the cover suggests. Eleanor matters, and the relationship is the book’s clearest source of hope, but it is a thread rather than the plot. If “funny” is what drew you, calibrate — the jokes are real, but they are the jokes of someone having a very hard time. If “dead” in the title is what worried you, relax a little: the book is gentle with its narrator, and it leaves the window open.

My honest note: A small, precise novel about how loud the inside of an anxious head can be, and how little it takes for someone to feel seen. If you want a romance or a romp, it will frustrate you. If you want a queer narrator you will recognise, it is worth every page.

Element	In Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
Central relationship	Gilda & Eleanor — a new relationship Gilda hides at work; a secondary thread rather than the plot
Core tropes	Anxious narrator, closeted at work, mistaken identity, impersonation by email, dark comedy, dysfunctional family
Setting	A contemporary Catholic parish office, Gilda’s crumbling apartment and her parents’ house
Heat level	1/5 — minimal; not indexed by romance.io
Series	Standalone — Austin’s later novels are unconnected
Content notes	Suicidal thoughts, depression and panic attacks, death and grief, animal death, alcoholism, suicide, homophobia and religious bigotry, self harm, car accident

How Spicy Is Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead?

Barely at all — a 1/5. romance.io, the site’s usual heat source, does not index the book, which tells you straight away that nobody is cataloguing it as romance. The number comes from reader reports instead: Goodreads and StoryGraph reviewers talk about anxiety, grief, the church and Gilda’s family, and none I found describes an on-page sex scene. Eleanor’s role is emotional, not erotic.

The thing worth flagging in advance is not spice but darkness. StoryGraph’s crowd-sourced warnings are led by suicidal thoughts, mental illness and panic attacks, with animal death, alcoholism and suicide further down the list, and 61% of readers tag the mood as dark. If you want something in the same low-heat, high-feeling register, Our Wives Under the Sea and The Pull of the Stars sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you live with anxiety or depression and want to see it written honestly, you like a distinctive first-person voice more than a fast plot, you enjoy humour that sits right next to sadness, and a short, complete literary novel suits you better than a series.

You may want to skip it if: you are looking for a sapphic romance with the relationship at the centre, looping internal monologue wears you out, you were promised a comedy and need the laughs to outweigh the weight, or suicidal ideation and death anxiety are hard reading for you right now.

In short: an intimate, recognisable portrait of an anxious queer mind, sold a little brighter than it reads.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

Five years after publication, this is not a book riding a single viral moment — it is a book that never stopped being passed around. More than 102,531 Goodreads ratings and roughly 37,600 on StoryGraph make it one of the most widely read titles I have covered. The TikTok hashtag for the title shows about 2.6 million views, and the videos that surface come from ordinary readers and public libraries rather than an author-driven campaign. The trade reception was warm: Kirkus predicted readers would root for its “lovable but traumatized heroine,” The New York Times Book Review reviewed it, and the publisher’s editorial block also carries praise credited to Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. Reddit was unreachable from my environment, so I cannot report on it. The audiobook, from Simon & Schuster Audio, is narrated by Emily Tremaine and runs 7 hours 46 minutes.

Prefer audio? Listen to Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Recognition, first and overwhelmingly. The most common review is some version of a reader saying Gilda’s head is their head — readers with anxiety, depression or dissociation say the book gave them language for things they had never managed to explain, and one called it the exact opposite of escapism. Next comes Gilda herself, who draws real affection; the Eleanor Oliphant comparison comes up again and again. The dark humour is named as the thing that makes the weight bearable, and a notable number of readers say it made them cry. At least one reader reads Gilda as autistic and calls the book a love letter to autistic lesbian women.

What readers argue about and complain about: Tone, above everything. The largest group of low-star reviewers went in expecting a dark comedy and describe something closer to relentlessly depressing — heartbreaking rather than funny, with little relief. The second theme is form: the fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness chapters and catalogues of mundane detail strike some readers as choppy, tedious or disconnected, and at least one reviewer abandoned the book halfway for that reason. Kirkus, for once, saw this coming: its otherwise positive review warns that the running monologue about death may grate on some readers. Third: the supporting cast, which several reviewers call thin or forgettable outside Jeff and Eleanor, with one singling out a side plot involving a fitness-obsessed man as unnecessary. Beyond that, a few readers wanted more from the ending and a couple found the quirkiness self-conscious. One one-star reviewer objects to the premise itself, arguing that it treats a lesbian working at a church as inherently absurd and that its religious commentary is juvenile — a single voice, but a coherent one. The real split is between readers who experience the bleakness as honesty and readers who experience it as a mood they cannot escape.

The standalone question worth asking first: it stands entirely alone. There is no sequel and nothing further to read to finish Gilda’s story. If you want more of Austin, the catalogue holds up: Interesting Facts about Space sits at 3.87 across roughly 38,500 Goodreads ratings, We Could Be Rats at 3.94 across about 22,100, and her 2026 novel Is This a Cry for Help? at 3.89 across about 18,400 — all within a tenth of a star of this one, which makes her unusually consistent.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead a romance?

No. It is literary fiction with a lesbian narrator and a meaningful relationship subplot with Eleanor. The relationship is one strand rather than the centre.

How spicy is Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead?

Barely — a 1/5. romance.io does not index it, and none of the reader reviews I found describe on-page sex. The heat is emotional rather than physical.

Is it actually funny?

Partly. Readers consistently praise the deadpan humour, especially Gilda’s attempts to pass as Catholic, but the largest group of critics say it is far bleaker than its dark-comedy marketing suggests. Expect laughs inside a sad book, not a comedy.

What content warnings should I know about?

Suicidal thoughts, depression, panic attacks, death and grief lead StoryGraph’s reader-submitted warnings. Animal death, alcoholism, suicide, homophobia and religious bigotry also appear.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. Simon & Schuster Audio published it in July 2021, narrated by Emily Tremaine and running 7 hours 46 minutes.

If You Loved Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Read These Next

If the collision between a lesbian heroine and the church is what landed, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit runs the same collision as a coming-of-age story, with a sharper and funnier edge. For a darker, stranger novel about death anxiety and grief between two women, Our Wives Under the Sea shares this book’s low heat and high feeling. And for another literary lesbian protagonist who is frightened, lonely and funny at once, try Patsy.

For more in this register, browse our literary and character-driven lesbian fiction guide, the best sapphic books of all time, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a book that wants to make death anxiety bearable by making it specific. Gilda’s voice is unforgettable, the church premise is both funny and exact, and the portrait of anxiety and depression is one readers keep calling the truest they have read. It is also bleaker than it is sold, loose and fragmentary by design, and thin on everyone except its narrator. Whether that trade works depends on whether you want to be inside Gilda’s head — but the reader who does gets a short, tender, complete novel that means a great deal to a lot of people. Check Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead ranks as a widely read lesbian literary dark comedy — piercingly honest about anxiety, weighed down by its own gloom, and best approached for Gilda’s voice rather than for laughs or romance.