Celeste Ng [ing] has been on my radar for years. Probably since Little Fires Everywhere came out, in 20-something. From the synopsis of her books, I could tell she was more of a literary fiction writer with slight mystery undertones and unlikable characters. I enjoyed the prospects of a family drama-filled book, although a character-driven story isn’t exactly where I thrive. And so years went by without taking the leap and picking up one of her books. Until I came across Everything I Never Told You with a great discount price, I could never resist a bargain.
Title: Everything I Never Told You Author: Celeste Ng Publication year: 2014 Length: 10 hours Genre: Literary Fiction, Mystery, Family Drama Pace: Medium Story focus: Characters
Lydia is dead. Her family doesn’t know it yet. But she’s dead, not far from home, in a lake just across the street. Drown and alone. This tragedy caught the family by surprise. How could her perfect little daughter end up in a situation like that? Little by little, we begin to unravel the past that leads to this tragic ending, while always keeping one foot in the present.
I haven’t put this book back on the shelf. I just can’t bring myself to do it. Because the moment I put it away, it means it’s really over, and I don’t want to part ways. Not yet.
The Lees aren’t a normal family. James comes from a first-generation immigrant family and ends up marrying Marilyn, a white woman. In a time when mixed couples just became legal, race plays a big part in this family story, even though they try to overlook it. And, this is the biggest problem of this family. They don’t communicate. They don’t share their wants and needs, either because their education taught them not to or because society showed them they shouldn’t. All of them harbour hurt deep inside that they never share. And so they compensate, but in the wrong way.
More than anything, I feel this story focuses a lot on the impact the parents have on their children. Not only for what they say, but also for how they say, and what they don’t say. The story is filled with miscommunication, but not that annoying romance trope. It’s more subtle and doesn’t lead to drama spilling everywhere. Instead, it causes hurt, resentment, sadness, and loneliness. On the outside, they all seem like a normal family, but on the inside, they are all broken apart from each other. They aren’t connected at all. They all sit at the same table, they all share the same meal, but they aren’t together.
The story highlights the selfishness of the parents. They look like grown-up teenagers still trying to work out what to do with their lives and forgetting they have three small children who need their parents. More often than not, they aren’t parents. So obsessed with their lives and how they aren’t where they imagined, it leaves no room to even think about the children.
You might think, well, there’s the reason why Lydia is dead. But it’s so much more complex than that. This isn’t a murder case or a version of Thirteen Reasons Why. The story really goes deep into each character’s needs and where they stem from. James tries to ignore his race and become more American. We get to see where that all started, the impact it had on his upbringing and how that still conditions his present as well as the effects on the closest people around him. The same goes for Marilyn. It’s about a different problem, but the result is the same. Neither of them talks about the stuff that’s on their mind. They simply act. And the people around them have to make sense of what happened. Often the wrong one.
Their three children are the ones who suffer with it the most. James and Marilyn might have made a silent pact to ignore each other’s problems and not share their deepest fears and regrets, but their children haven’t. And they keep looking at their parents for guidance. Something they keep refusing to acknowledge. The dynamic between parents and children is very important. It has the most impact on the little ones, since it’s part of the foundations for the adults they’ll one day become. And in the present, we already get to see how their parents conditioned who they are, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes it broke my heart to read about the silent screams these children were crying. I just wanted to reach over the page and hold them. They didn’t have any fault for anything that happened in the story, and yet they were the ones who suffered the most. They were ready to carry their parents’ faults as if they were their own. It was an interesting way to see children’s psychology at work.
Everything I Never Told You is exactly that. Everything no one told the other. Everything Lydia never got to tell her family. Everything each of them hides. Everything that led to this tragic ending. And everything they still keep quiet. On one hand, the end brings closure to Lydia’s death, making the family whole. But, at the same time, it’s still not a happy ending because they still keep avoiding communicating.
Lydia somehow brought them together when they were drifting apart, but still didn’t change anything. And I like that. Habits are hard to change, and opening up to others is something that needs time and practice. It doesn’t happen overnight. And not having the characters suddenly go: “this is where I was wrong”, “this is what I’ll change”. That isn’t realistic, and I’m tired of Happy Ever Afters when life is more complex than that. That Happy Ever After can arrive. James, Marilyn and their children might grow closer together and start to share more about their lives, but only down the line, in the future. Not in the present. Lydia’s death doesn’t present itself as a magic event that suddenly cures everything, and they are all sharing their feelings now. They have started to acknowledge how their actions affect others. Now, it’s up to them to act to change or to leave everything as is. But we don’t get to see that, and that’s okay. It’s better than a forced Happy Ever After.
Everything I Never Told You is a book to enjoy what exists in the middle. That’s where the story shines. That’s its best part. It’s not the ending or seeing the resolution. Instead, it is to exist in the middle of all the chaos. Understand the characters to their core. That’s the beauty of this story. And if you ever choose to read this book, I hope you have as hard of a time as I did to put this book away.
