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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Failure
Everything I Never Told You focuses on a family in grief but, before the death of Lydia, theirs is a family suffering through the ramifications of failure. Both James and Marilyn fail to achieve their goals and, even though their lives seem pleasant, their failures affect their children, particularly Lydia. The reality that she might fail physics, an advanced class that Marilyn has manipulated her into taking, causes the central family conflict in the months before her death, overshadowing Nathan’s success at gaining admission to Harvard. Both the fear of failure and the ways that failure can shape a life are recurring elements in the novel.
Mementoes
The Lee family tends not to share their feelings with words, instead using objects to represent how they feel about one another. Throughout the novel, possessions provide an index of a character’s emotions, linking them to people or places. When Marilyn leaves her family to take up her studies again, she takes small objects to remind her of each of them. Her choice of everyday things, like a button, tethers her to the family by providing a connection to their quotidian routines. While she kept only Doris’s cookbook, a symbol of everything she most disliked about, Marilyn’s choice of these mementoes suggests intimate connections. Hannah also takes objects to represent her siblings, distant from her even though they share a home. James’s mother brings a steamer for pork buns with her from China. As these examples illustrate, in a novel where characters often do not explain their true emotions, mementoes sometimes speak for them.
Perspective
There is no single, unified narrative perspective in Everything I Never Told You, so readers must piece together what has happened from the partial views of the various family members. Some, like Doris or James’s parents, are only seen from the perspective of their children, while others, like Hannah, are only afforded minimal space in the novel. That each of the main characters struggles with the limitations of what they can or cannot see and say complicates the story, introducing tension to the narrative and emotional stress to the characters. The limited yet myriad perspectives used to tell the story also symbolize the fragmented way Chinese-American culture exists in America, with aspects of it unknown due to limited experience and frame of reference.
Additionally, James’s interest in space, along with his use of a telescope, suggests yet another way that perspective works in the novel. Using a telescope, one can see things from afar differently, indicating the value of a flexible approach to perspective in both science and human relations. The earth is small when viewed from the moon, as James stresses in the book’s closing pages.
