Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

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Through a series of odd behaviors, Gilda becomes a suspect in the death of the former secretary who she never met. If you are fixated on death or on the purpose of your life, there is some relief offered to you by the Catholic Church and by most religions. I can understand the reasoning: the book is written from the perspective of someone with a fragmented mind. A: I think most anxiety and depression boils down to recognizing our own mortality, and the fact that everyone we know will someday die.

She lost her job because she frequently slept in and missed her shifts or the effort of getting up was more than she could manage. Gilda's overwhelming questions about the nature of existence don't go away; transformed by wonder, they turn into love instead. We learn of her thoughts, her difficult interactions with others, her conversations, and her behavior.I thought she was endearing and relatable and there are some genuinely sweet, moving lines in this book. However, there is a serious side to the book, and that might deter readers who prefer their fiction to be light and airy.

Q: Gilda’s fascination with death—both her preoccupation with how everyone will someday be dead (hence the title) and her fear that it could come for anyone at any moment—is so prominent throughout the book.A minor liability is that the novel does jump around a bit in time and space: one minute we might be in the church’s sanctuary, the next minute we could be in a flashback to something that happened with Gilda as a little girl, and the next she’s having an argument with her parents in the story’s current timeline. But this is a double-edged sword, because I also have no reason to ever attempt to hone or even improve this skill. This book is all about the thought of death being the main form of anxiety for Gilda and the thought of this consumes her everyday and there is always something leading her back to this thought, whether it be taking a job from a dead lady or witnessing a house fire she will constantly be thinking about death. While the narrator is anxious beyond measure, the prose is self-assured - brisk and effortless, moving through time and space with ease. That this was able to do so much - make me feel this much - in such a limited amount of pages is a fantastic accomplishment.