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Everything I Never Told You explores the mysterious death of 16-year-old Lydia Lee. Though the novel is not classified as a detective mystery, elements central to that genre are incorporated into the story. For example, although the police do interview people and search for clues, their actions are ancillary to the main action, which focuses on the dynamics in the Lee household. The narrative is nonlinear, shifting from the months after Lydia’s death to events before she was born, when her parents were themselves children. In addition to its nonlinear timeline, the novel is also told from multiple points of view. These fragmented structural and perspective story elements allow the cracks and fissures in the Lee family to appear gradually and to become more significant and obvious as the plot unfolds.
As much as the story is about Lydia Lee, it is also the story of her parents. Her father, James Lee, a Chinese-American, immigrated as a boy to the United States with his parents. His story captures the reality of what it was like to be a young, Chinese-American boy during the 1950s. Many immigrants were “paper sons,” or illegal immigrants who bought identity papers from a citizen willing to pretend to be related to them. In this way, many immigrants lost ties to their identities and histories. People also used false names to remain undetected by law enforcement, and this meant they needed the cover that a large community could sometimes offer. They lived in a general state of fear of being discovered. James’s story reveals that Chinese immigrants during the era of his childhood lived in clustered immigrant villages or Chinatowns to evade harsh immigration laws. James’s desire to blend in, rather than stand out, has a long history. James’s interest in American history and his focus on the cowboy symbolizes his need to blend in, but is ironic, given that cowboys idealize an American stereotype that’s unattainable for the “paper sons.”
Lydia’s mother Marilyn’s childhood is also shaped by fantasy. In her case, it is the model of the ideal nuclear family associated with the 1950s. Because Marilyn’s father abandons the family when she is three, her mother Doris’s efforts to keep a perfect home, as directed by her “bible”—Betty Crocker’s Cookbook—are redirected into teaching girls how to conform to the socio-cultural expectations of the 1950s. Marilyn rejects the stereotypical model of what makes a fulfilling life for women but is unable to escape the expectations associated with motherhood and marriage. Both Marilyn and James draw on their complicated pasts as they raise their own children. Yet, because their experiences rely on divergent understandings of what it means to be different, their expectations are nearly impossible to realize.
Although James and Marilyn have three children, Lydia is the focus of her parents’ attention. Both are drawn to her because she has blue eyes, a genetic rarity among children with Asian parents. Although she is not the oldest child, she is the focus of her mother’s attention because Marilyn projects her frustrated desires onto her daughter. Although this favoritism has its attractive elements—Lydia is the center of the family—it is more often a burden for her. At the holidays, for example, Lydia receives only gifts that support her parents’ aims, like a book on how to make friends (from James) or books on women scientists (from Marilyn). Little effort is made to understand what Lydia herself might prefer. It is unclear if Lydia would be able to articulate who she is given that she is still very much a baby, a trait exemplified in her use of the perfume Love’s Baby Soft. In many ways, Lydia has not been allowed to grow up, something paralleled in her literal inability to grow up due to untimely death.
As death’s silence surrounds Lydia, the family must reckon with the disparities between the fantasies they had created around her and the realities they must accept. Silence is a regular fact in the novel, flagged from its title and part of its plot at every turn, but the fact that death makes answers impossible presents a particularly fraught challenge. Further, because Lydia is given little personal freedom to establish a personal identity, there are few clues to help the family move through its grief—a fact most powerfully captured in the blank diaries on the girl’s shelves. When Marilyn finds a bag with cigarettes and condoms, she is forced to realize that she did not know Lydia all that well. The most unnoticed member of the family, quiet Hannah, steps out of the corners in which she usually hides, helping all of them to heal. As Lydia moves from the center of attention to silence, Hannah, always described as quiet, finds her voice and a new role in the family.
At the end of their investigation, the police conclude that Lydia’s death was a suicide. This is neither right nor wrong. When she rows out to the middle of the lake, Lydia does not intend to die. Remembering her experience with Nathan at the lake when she nearly drowned as a child, she hopes to inverse its dynamic, now embracing life where before she found the possibility of death comforting. Although religion is seldom mentioned in the novel, Lydia’s plan resembles the kind of rebirth one might experience through baptism. That she dies instead is a tragic but predictable outcome, as she never learned to swim. Lydia’s drowning illustrates what happens to a culture when history repeats itself as well as what transpires when one suppresses their identity to conform to societal norms and the expectations of others.
It is not wrong to consider that in the systematic erasure of her identity across the novel, Lydia does take her own life. In deciding that she will agree to anything her mother proposes, and in pretending to her father to be a person she is not, Lydia persistently subordinates her desires and needs as well as her identity. This issue is not unlike the pretense and invisibility suffered in her family’s history, which is shown through James’s “paper sons” experience and Marilyn’s repressed Betty Crocker upbringing. Not being truly seen is a persistent theme throughout the book. She so thoroughly lets other people determine who she is and what she should want that Lydia Lee ceases to exist long before she drowns in the lake.
