Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead Summary – Emily Austin
A Wrong Turn Into a Whole New Life
A flyer offering free mental health support should be a simple lifeline. For Gilda, the twenty-seven-year-old narrator of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, it becomes the starting point of an elaborate mess.
Emily Austin’s novel follows a broke, anxious atheist who walks into the wrong address, gets mistaken for a job applicant, and — too desperate and too polite to correct anyone — accepts a receptionist job at a Catholic church. What follows is a story told from inside a mind that fixates on death, catastrophe, and every social rule it might be breaking.
Set in Ontario, the book pairs deadpan humor with a direct look at anxiety. Here is what happens, who is involved, and what readers should expect.
TL;DR: An Atheist, a Church, and a Web of Lies
Gilda takes a job she never applied for at St. Rigobert’s Catholic Church, then keeps lying to protect others from pain.
One impersonation leads to a police investigation, a broken relationship, and a full mental health crisis before any truth comes out.
- The setup: An anxious, unemployed atheist is mistaken for a job candidate at a Catholic church and accepts on the spot.
- The core deception: She answers the dead secretary’s emails while pretending to be her, to spare the secretary’s elderly best friend from grief.
- The pressure: A police probe into the secretary’s death, a collapsing romance, and a family that denies her brother’s addiction push Gilda toward a breakdown.
- The shape: Five parts named after seasons of the Catholic liturgical calendar, from Advent to Easter.
- The landing point: Confession, forgiveness, and small daily routines rather than a dramatic fix.
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Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead Summary: The Full Story
Spoiler warning: This section reveals major plot points, including the ending of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead.
Gilda opens the book driving herself to the hospital after a car crash. Her airbag broke her arm, but ER staff already recognize her — a frequent visitor who mistakes panic attacks for heart attacks.
She has just been fired from a bookstore after missing five shifts to exhaustion and depression. Bills, maxed-out credit cards, and overdue rent leave her searching for help, which is how she finds the flyer for 1919 Peach Tree Crescent.
The address leads to St. Rigobert’s, a gothic Catholic church. Father Jeff, its elderly priest, assumes she is interviewing for the secretary position left vacant by the death of Grace Moppet.
Unable to correct him, Gilda says she is Catholic and takes the job.
At her new desk, she logs into Grace’s email and finds messages from Rosemary, Grace’s out-of-town best friend, who does not know Grace has died. Unable to deliver the news, Gilda begins replying as Grace.
The lies multiply. She fakes her way through mass, hides that she is a lesbian atheist, and endures dates with Giuseppe, an arrogant “life coach” pushed on her by a pushy parishioner.
In her real life, she dates Eleanor, a patient tech worker, but ghosts her texts and withdraws. Meanwhile, a local nurse named Laurie Damon confesses to giving elderly patients lethal injections, and Officer Parks starts asking whether Grace’s death was one of them.
Family strain runs alongside the church plot. Gilda’s brother Eli battles severe alcoholism, but their parents refuse to acknowledge it. When she confronts them at Christmas dinner, her mother orders her out of the house.
Toxicology reports then give Laurie Damon an alibi for the night Grace died. The case stays open and officially suspicious, and Barney — the church’s true-crime-obsessed accountant — starts suggesting a killer sits in the congregation.
Paranoid, Gilda first suspects Father Jeff, then Barney. She sneaks into the priest’s private quarters to search for clues and hides under his bed for four hours when he returns.
From under the bed, she hears him pray tearfully for Grace. She slips out unseen, realizing he is only a grieving old man.
Her amateur investigation escalates. She follows Barney home and peers into his kitchen window until his pregnant daughter spots her, and Gilda flees into a corner store.
Her mental health then collapses. She dissociates, cuts her forearm, cycles through the emergency room, and receives an SSRI prescription. When Eli stops answering texts for over a week, she becomes convinced he is dead — until she learns he is alive.
Eleanor ends the relationship after finding Giuseppe’s messages on Gilda’s phone, assuming Gilda has been secretly seeing a man. Soon after, police question Gilda about her suspicious web searches, her unreported car crash, and her fake Catholic identity.
Rosemary is brought to the station to identify her. Behind two-way glass, Gilda breaks down, begging police not to tell Rosemary that Grace is dead.
From a holding cell, she spends her phone calls leaving long, honest voicemails — to Eleanor, Father Jeff, Giuseppe, Barney, her parents, and Eli. She confesses every lie and urges her brother to get help.
While Gilda is in custody, officers search Grace’s desk and find a suicide note inside a romance novel. Grace, eighty-six, wrote that she had chosen to end her life on her own terms. No murder occurred — Laurie Damon had only supplied the medication — and Gilda is cleared and released.
Emily Austin closes the book on quiet repair. Gilda meets Rosemary in person, receives her forgiveness, and hears that Grace would have found the entire situation hilarious.
Gilda builds small routines: making her bed, showering, washing dishes, stepping outside. She reunites with Eleanor.
The final scene finds the two of them on Gilda’s front steps, waiting for repairmen. They hear a whine from under the porch, and Gilda pulls out Mittens — the neighbor’s gray cat, missing since the November house fire — alive.
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The Cast of St. Rigobert’s and Beyond
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Gilda | Twenty-seven-year-old narrator; an anxious lesbian atheist who becomes the church secretary by accident. |
| Eleanor | Gilda’s girlfriend; a tech worker who loves nature and cottage life. |
| Father Jeff | The seventy-two-year-old priest of St. Rigobert’s who hires Gilda and grieves Grace. |
| Grace Moppet | The late church secretary whose unread emails and hidden suicide note drive the plot. |
| Rosemary Reeves | Grace’s elderly best friend, who emails Grace without knowing she has died. |
| Barney | The church accountant, fixated on true crime and serial killer theories. |
| Eli | Gilda’s younger brother, a former art student struggling with alcoholism and depression. |
| Gilda’s Parents | Avoidant parents who prioritize appearances over their children’s mental health. |
| Giuseppe | A twenty-nine-year-old “life coach” Gilda is pressured into dating. |
| Officer Parks | The detective investigating Grace Moppet’s death. |
| Laurie Damon | A nurse who confesses to providing fatal drug doses to elderly patients. |
| Mittens | The neighbor’s gray cat, lost in a house fire and found in the final scene. |
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Book Snapshot: The Facts at a Glance
- Genre & Subgenre: Literary and contemporary fiction; dark comedy; LGBTQ+ fiction.
- Core Narrative Tropes: Accidental job and mistaken identity, impostor syndrome, amateur sleuthing, unreliable internal perception, comedy of errors.
- Tone & Atmosphere: Deadpan, anxious, melancholic, intimate, and darkly humorous.
- Primary Conflict: Gilda’s internal fight against severe anxiety, depression, and dread, compounded by the lies she maintains while Grace’s death is investigated.
- Pacing Style: Fast, episodic vignettes built on short paragraphs and a linear timeline.
- Book Structure: Five parts following the liturgical calendar — Advent, Twelvetide, Ordinary Time, Lent, and Easter.
- Pages: 256.
- ISBN: 978-1982167363 (Washington Square Press, 2022).
- Author Background: Emily Austin is a Canadian writer from Ontario; this was her debut novel.
Is Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead Right for You?
This book suits readers who want a first-person character study rather than a plot-first mystery.
The investigation into Grace’s death exists, but the pacing stays anchored to Gilda’s daily routines and internal monologue.
It fits fans of dark comedy about mental health, readers of LGBTQ+ fiction, and anyone drawn to anxious, confessional narration.
The episodic structure moves quickly, but the emotional content covers depression, self-harm, and family denial directly.
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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman — A socially isolated, rigidly routine-driven protagonist whose loneliness and past trauma surface gradually, with humor woven through.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata — A deadpan narrator who performs a socially acceptable persona while hiding who she really is.
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