P.G. Smith Author

Tired of depressing politics? Climate catastrophes? Daily grind at work? Family dramas? Sometimes we just need a break. My solution (at least one of them.) Lose yourself in a book. Here are two by Emily Austin, a delightful author that I recently discovered.

Everyone in this Room Will One Day Be Dead

This debut novel made Emily Austin one of my new favorite authors. In it we spend the whole time inside the head of Gilda, a very confused, anxious, and depressed young (27-year-old) lesbian, atheist, who has trouble keeping a job, or even getting out of bed some days. When she sort of accidentally accepts a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church, it ramps up her anxiety level to a fever pitch, but she really, really needs the job. Already obsessed with death and the pointlessness of life, Gilda finds the Catholic rituals unsettling to say the least, and maintaining her cover as a happy, straight Catholic girl is daunting and complicated. Yet, she likes and sympathizes with the people she meets there, and she desperately wants them to be happy, even though we are all momentary specks on a small planet circling an unexceptional star in a vast universe of nothingness.

It’s not surprising that Gilda wants the parishioners to be happy. She wants everyone to be happy, including animals. She just isn’t very good at producing that effect, even though she is willing to lie, impersonate someone she thinks might make people happy, or even do things that cause her to have serious panic attacks later.

Soon it becomes clear that Grace (Gilda’s predecessor at the receptionist desk) died under mysterious circumstances, possibly murder. Gilda becomes obsessed with finding out who did it. When, through a twist of fate, she becomes a prime suspect, it doesn’t help her anxiety issues one bit.

If you ever feel like an outsider, or wonder about the meaning of life, or just need a good laugh, this book is for you. It’s like Woody Allen meets Ellen DeGeneris.

Interesting Facts About Space

“A teenaged girl was brutally axed to death by her grandmother.” How’s that for a gripping first sentence? Especially in a book that is primarily aimed at making you laugh. Enid, the primary character and narrator is a paranoid, socially awkward woman, who is addicted to true crime podcasts, pathologically afraid of bald men, is deaf in one ear (from birth), and believes she is a bad person who might be capable of doing harm. She starts noticing things out of place–a cupboard door ajar, a window open that she is sure she closed. Things like that. She starts to believe that someone is stalking her, somehow entering her apartment when she is not there.

Suffice it to say that Enid is not the only messed up person in this book. In fact, just about everyone has issues. Her mother has suffered from depression ever since her divorce. Enid is very close to her mother and worries about her, but since she is unable to express her affection, she tells her mother interesting facts about space. She knows a lot of them since she works for the space agency organizing data. She loves her job but starts having trouble when a bald man is hired to help her with a project. And she can’t even relax at home because a bald man moves in down the hall.

This is a fast-paced book with a lot of suspense and very quirky characters. I wouldn’t call it a suspense novel per se, because it’s so funny and character driven. But it really is suspenseful. I couldn’t put it down until I found out if she was really imagining everything, and if not, who was stalking her, and if not stalking, why (and how) was someone going in her apartment? And who is it? And why is she so terrified of bald men? Will she lose her job? Can she manage to keep her suicidal mom alive when she keeps going off her meds? And will things work out with Polly? This book is full of questions and none of them get answered until the end. I love that kind of book. If you love that kind of book, this one will be your reward.

Emily Austin wields her pen with authority and style. She is a smart new author who captures the crazy absurdity and stress of contemporary life with sympathy and humor.