Everyone In This Room Wishes They Were Dead: Emily Austin Captures the Dysthymia of a Queer Generation
Illustration by Breah Johnson
Here’s a joke: a depressed, atheist lesbian who just lost her position at a bookstore walks into a Catholic church seeking group therapy and walks out with the job of a woman who may have been murdered by a crazy nurse. Ha! Ha! Ha?
It’s funnier when Emily Austin tells it.
Austin’s first novel, “Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead” is a funny and honest look at our darkest fears about life and humanity. Embarrassingly relatable, Austin’s protagonist Gilda epitomizes the pervasive depression and general neurosis experienced by Millennials and Gen Z alike. Austin’s writing is incredibly poignant and gave words to hyper-specific experiences I never thought other people had. Despite the existential terror explored throughout the novel, it made me feel less alone.
“Are you depressed?” she asks.
“Yes,” I reply. I feel blood drip from my arm onto my hand.
“When did you start feeling depressed?” she asks.
I pause to think. “I think I was eleven.”
“Eleven? That’s a long time to be feeling this way. Did something happen when you were eleven?”
“No, not really,” I answer, discreetly rubbing the blood off on my dark jeans.”
Like a lot of depressed people, Gilda seems to actually love life. She loves people, frequently weeping over the smallest displays of earnest behavior. She loves her brother Eli, she loves her dead rabbit, she loves her neighbor's missing cat, she loves the dead woman whose job she’s filled, she loves the dead woman’s internet friend who doesn’t know she’s dead, she loves the straight couple getting married, and she might just love a girl named Eleanor, too.
“Everyone In This Room…” starts with a car crash. Gilda heads to the ER, where she is known by name for her panic attacks, and for once has something the doctors know how to treat. Emily Austin is quick in illustrating the full-blown dysthymic neurosis of Gilda. Racing, compulsive thoughts; hypochondria; generalized anxiety; major depression.
Dysthymia, also known as Persistent Depressive Disorder, is considered to be a long-term mild depression lasting for at least two years. Here, I am using it in the descriptive sense rather than diagnostic, and here’s why. Unsurprisingly, the Mayo Clinic categorizes the condition as “very common” with more than 3 million cases per year in the United States alone. Perhaps a label out of insurance necessity, Dysthymia is the epitome of the “it’s just a chemical imbalance” discourse surrounding depression, and like other diagnoses fails to note that we live in a deeply depressing and traumatizing society. Two years? It’s 2022. By now don’t most Americans fit that definition? Wouldn’t most folks of marginalized and brutalized identities qualify for such a diagnosis? Gen Z is reportedly the Queerest generation so far, but in a world and culture still hostile to Queer people, particularly Black and Brown trans people, how can the kids possibly be alright?
“Memories of being younger than eleven were starting to fade. I didn’t feel eleven; I often accidentally answered that I was ten when people asked. I felt like time was moving quickly. I felt nostalgic for being younger, and it bothered me that I’d forgotten things… I was never in the moment I was in.”
Gilda turns 28 in the novel, outliving Kurt Cobain, she notes. Assuming the book is contemporary, that means Gilda was eleven in the mid-90s. A Millennial. It’s apparent throughout the novel and in her own words that she has never felt the age she actually is, so fittingly her malaise perfectly captures that of the Gen Z/Millennial cusp. She is deeply sad from a very young age.
Is it a chemical imbalance or is it the severe bullying and sexual harassment she faced for being an openly gay tween in the 90s? Is it low serotonin or is it the verbal abuse of her father and emotional neglect of her mother? Is it a biological mishap or the sudden death of her pet rabbit in childhood being highly traumatic for an already sensitive child? Perhaps it is a combination. Regardless, Gilda herself seems unaware of the relationship between her childhood experiences and her fast-growing depression. Still, as a reader, it feels clear that her depression is not the result of some random, synaptic cosmic cruelty.
“I was always looking back, or worried about the future. I remember it was windy and the grass was swaying; ladybugs were clinging to the swaying blades or flying away. I felt incredibly sad and aware of how strange it was to feel so sad in such a bright, pleasant setting.”
Like a lot of anxious people, her obsession with death is largely to do with not wanting her loved ones to die. She ruminates on the afterlife and what death itself means for our lives, and her conclusions leave her unsatisfied and in a state of dissociated despair. Gilda is always, always grieving. She is dysthymic about death.
“I was an eleven-year-old girl lying in the grass one summer. I knew in that moment that was true and recognized that I would blaze through moments for the rest of my life, forgetting things, and becoming ages older, until I forgot everything —so I consoled myself by committing to remember that one moment.”
The first time we see Gilda happy is about halfway through the novel when Eleanor is laughing “like a duck” at a movie they watched together. Spoiler here, but I am happy to report there is a happy gay ending for the two of them. By the end, I was crying so hard I was struggling to wipe the tears away fast enough to continue reading. It was refreshing to indulge in a Queer story where the characters are not punished for being gay but are instead met with endless compassion and tender love despite a possibly uncaring universe.
