The Disability Book Archive

[ID: A book cover. The background is cream. Cartoonish art of a person holding a blue rabbit stretches from the top to the bottom of the cover. The person’s head cannot be seen. They are wearing a yellow t-shirt and blue jeans. The title “Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead” is written across the shirt in large black, curly caps. “A Novel” is written on the rabbit in smaller caps. The author’s name “Emily Austin” is at the bottom of the cover in black caps. Below it, a quote reading “Humor, wisdom and tenderness shine through on every page” from the New York Times, by Sarah Haywood, author of ‘The Cactus’. /end]

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Content Warning:

• Suicidal Thoughts
• Alcoholism
• Panic Attacks
• Homophobia
• Animal Death
• Pain Killer Addiction

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Summary:

In this “fun, page-turner of a novel” (Sarah Haywood, New York Times bestselling author) that’s perfect for fans of Mostly Dead Things and Goodbye, Vitamin, a morbidly anxious young woman stumbles into a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church and soon finds herself obsessed with her predecessor’s mysterious death.

Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace.

In between trying to memorize the lines to Catholic mass, hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, and erecting a dirty dish tower in her crumbling apartment, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace’s old friend. She can’t bear to ignore the kindly old woman who has been trying to reach her friend through the church inbox, but she also can’t bring herself to break the bad news. Desperate, she begins impersonating Grace via email. But when the police discover suspicious circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, Gilda may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence.

With a “kindhearted heroine we all need right now” (Courtney Maum, New York Times bestselling author), Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a crackling and “delightfully weird reminder that we will one day turn to dust and that yes, this is depressing, but it’s also what makes life beautiful” (Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl).

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Notes:

There is an audiobook.

(Actually, I think the audiobook may have come out first)

One of the side characters is an alcoholic transgender male with a pain killer addiction.

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Archivist Comments:

I’ve done so many of these now that I’m starting to see patterns in them and some of the information I find about them before I find it. I saw the rabbit and immediately got nervous for the content warnings.

This isn’t the original cover for the book, but I do believe it may be one of the most recent ones. The other ones I’ve seen have a woman dressed in orange against an orange background, and another has the title broken up up by rows of colourful leaping rabbits. Very cute.

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