Episode 2: Emily Austin on libraries, identity, and Is This a Cry for Help?

Today we sit down with bestselling Canadian author Emily Austin, known for Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space, We Could Be Rats, and her upcoming 2026 novel Is This a Cry for Help?

Emily’s work blends dark humor with tenderness, exploring lesbian identity, mental health, neurodivergence, and the contradictions of being human. In this conversation, she digs into character creation, religious trauma, queerness, librarianship, and the messy, beautiful inner lives that shape her fiction.

In this episode, we explore:

• The real library experience that inspired the opening of Is This a Cry for Help?
• The hidden biases baked into the Dewey Decimal System
• Writing invisible disabilities and internalized shame with honesty and humor
• How compulsory heterosexuality shaped both Emily’s life and Darcy’s story
• The chaos of sharing a name with a Fox News reporter

This week's recommendation:

• Goddess of Filth by V. Castro

Intro + Outro music by Trevor Vaughan