Emily Austin has built her literary reputation on crafting protagonists who exist in that uncomfortable space between self-awareness and self-deception, between who they thought they’d be and who they actually are. With Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin, she delivers perhaps her most ambitious and layered exploration yet of what it means to excavate your past while trying to live in your present.
A Librarian’s Return to the Chaos
The story centers on Darcy, a thirty-two-year-old librarian returning to work after a two-month medical leave following a mental breakdown. What triggered the collapse? News of her ex-boyfriend Ben’s sudden death from a brain aneurysm—a man she hadn’t spoken to in a decade, a relationship she’d spent years trying not to think about. Darcy’s carefully constructed present life seems ideal: she’s married to Joy, a bookbinder; they own a lakeside house filled with books and two cats; she has a stable career doing work she values. But Ben’s death cracks open something she’d sealed shut, and suddenly the past refuses to stay buried.
If that weren’t enough, Darcy returns to find her workplace under siege. Protesters led by a man named Declan Turner have targeted the library over pornography policies, LGBTQ+ materials, and inclusive programming. What follows is a dual narrative: Darcy’s internal reckoning with her past self and her external battle to defend intellectual freedom and the library as a democratic institution.
The Architecture of a Life Half-Remembered
Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin excels in its psychological excavation. Austin understands that memory is not a reliable narrator, especially when we’ve deliberately repressed entire chapters of our lives. Darcy’s memories of Ben arrive in fragments—a bathroom mirror, lukewarm showers, a ceiling crack shaped like a vulva, the smell of fabric softener with teddy bears on the package. These hyper-specific domestic details anchor the story in visceral reality while revealing how Darcy existed in that relationship as someone other than herself.
The novel’s structure mirrors Darcy’s fractured mental state. Present-day library drama intersects with therapy sessions that use “imaginal revisiting” to unpack her relationship with Ben. We learn she dated him from ages eighteen to twenty-three while he was twenty-eight to thirty-three—a ten-year age gap that Darcy, like many young women, didn’t question at the time but now recognizes as problematic. She performed femininity, people-pleased compulsively, and suppressed her authentic self to fit the role of “girlfriend” that Ben and society expected.
The revelation of Darcy’s sexuality—that she’s a lesbian who spent five years with a man—could have been handled as a simple coming-out narrative. Instead, Austin presents something more nuanced: how compulsory heterosexuality, age gaps, and power dynamics can trap someone in a life they never consciously chose. Darcy’s realization occurs not as dramatic epiphany but as slow accumulation of wrongness, culminating in an abortion that becomes the moment she “felt herself split in two.”
When Libraries Become Battlegrounds
The contemporary storyline involving library censorship provides brilliant counterpoint to Darcy’s personal journey. Austin clearly did her homework—the portrayal of reference work, patron interactions, collection development policies, and the actual mechanics of running a public library feels lived-in and authentic. The protesters’ complaints (drag queen story times that never happened, pornography policies misunderstood, books featuring LGBTQ+ characters or people of color) reflect real-world book challenges with uncomfortable accuracy.
The characterization of Declan Turner deserves particular attention. He could have been a one-dimensional villain, but Austin gives him dimension—we see him with his family, receive an apology from him, witness his genuine belief that he’s protecting his community. He remains antagonistic, but Austin refuses easy categorizations, which strengthens the novel’s argument about intellectual freedom. We don’t ban books we disagree with; we defend everyone’s right to access information, even when we find their views abhorrent.
The “Human Library” program that Darcy organizes—where people become “books” sharing their lived experiences—provides one of the novel’s most moving sequences. When Declan shows up to participate and Darcy volunteers to be his “book,” their conversation encapsulates the novel’s central tension: how do we maintain democratic spaces when we fundamentally disagree about what democracy means?
The Tender Cartography of a Queer Marriage
Joy, Darcy’s wife, could have been a supporting character, but Austin renders her with specificity and warmth. Their relationship provides the novel’s emotional bedrock—the difference between performance and presence, between being who someone wants you to be and being yourself with someone who loves exactly who you are. Small details illuminate their dynamic: Joy’s unconscious sleep-talking (“I bought these peaches, lady”), her tendency to make disastrous messes while Darcy is away, the way she naturally talks to strangers without artifice.
The contrast between Darcy’s relationship with Ben and her marriage to Joy crystallizes the novel’s meditation on authenticity. With Ben, Darcy:
Chose clothes based on his preferences
Faked orgasms as performance
Never refused sex even when sick
Made herself small and accommodating
Thought of intimacy as an obligation
With Joy, she speaks directly about her needs, takes up space unapologetically, and experiences desire without shame. The difference isn’t just about sexuality—it’s about power, agency, and the freedom to exist as a whole person rather than a role.
Where the Novel Stumbles
Despite its considerable strengths, Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin occasionally loses narrative momentum. The subplot involving mysterious emails (nude photos, old transition photos of Darcy’s coworker, bizarre bird-related reference questions) feels engineered rather than organic. While it eventually resolves in a way that connects to the censorship storyline, the investigation takes up considerable page space that might have been better devoted to Darcy’s psychological journey or the library’s challenges.
The therapy sessions, while psychologically astute, sometimes read more like craft essays on healing from complicated grief than lived experience. Dr. Jeong delivers insights that feel designed for reader edification rather than natural therapeutic conversation. The “imaginal revisiting” technique becomes predictable: Darcy closes her eyes, remembers something about Ben, opens them, receives wisdom. The structure, repeated multiple times, occasionally flattens what should be emotionally volatile territory.
Additionally, Austin’s characteristic dry humor—so effective in Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead—occasionally undercuts serious moments. When Darcy discovers a patron cooking meatballs in the library bathroom, the absurdist comedy jars against the novel’s graver concerns about censorship and mental health. The tonal inconsistency isn’t fatal, but it creates whiplash in a novel already juggling multiple registers.
The Weight of Becoming Yourself
What Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin accomplishes most powerfully is its exploration of how we carry all our previous selves—”I’m thirty-three; I’m twenty-seven. I’m eighteen. I’m nine. I was just born.” Darcy’s journey isn’t about rejecting who she was with Ben but about understanding why she performed that version of herself and forgiving both of them for the limitations they operated under.
The novel argues that personal growth requires examining not just our choices but the contexts that shaped them. Darcy can simultaneously acknowledge that Ben was “generous” and “protective” while recognizing those qualities reinforced her dependence. She can grieve his death while accepting that their relationship was fundamentally unsuited to who she actually was. This both/and thinking—refusing easy villains or saints—gives the novel its emotional complexity.
Austin’s previous works (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space) explored anxious, dissociative protagonists navigating absurdist situations. This novel feels like a maturation of those themes—Darcy’s anxiety stems from genuine trauma and societal pressure, and her path to healing involves not just medication but systemic understanding of how women, especially queer women, are taught to erase themselves.
For Readers Who Loved…
If Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin resonates, consider these companion reads:
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith – Another exploration of a woman realizing her queerness while in a heterosexual relationship
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado – Memoir examining a toxic queer relationship and how we narrate our own lives
Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey – Grief, memory, and how we reconstruct the past
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston – For lighter fare with similar themes of coming into queer identity
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett – On performed identities and who we become versus who we are
A Necessary Conversation About Libraries and Lives
Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin arrives at a moment when public libraries face unprecedented challenges to their mission and materials. Austin doesn’t offer simple solutions—she shows the exhausting, daily work of defending democratic institutions while processing personal grief. The novel argues that libraries matter not despite serving everyone, including those whose views we oppose, but because they serve everyone.
Darcy’s final letter to Ben, a culmination of her therapeutic work, avoids neat resolution. She can’t forgive him in person; she can only offer understanding across the unbridgeable distance death creates. Similarly, the library’s battle with censorship doesn’t end with triumph—it ends with Darcy continuing the work, one patron interaction at a time, one program defending intellectual freedom after another.
This is a novel about the labor of becoming yourself when you’ve spent years as someone else, about the institutions that make that becoming possible, and about how grief for our past selves can coexist with gratitude for who we’ve become. Emily Austin has written a book that trusts readers to sit with complexity, discomfort, and the messy reality that healing isn’t linear and growth doesn’t erase what came before—it incorporates it into something truer.