Have you ever been accused of being too happy? Do people get sick and tired of your being in a good mood? Are you looking to become more melancholy or depressed? Well, this is the book for you. In Celeste Ng’s book Everything I never Told You every depressing thought and negative feeling that a family can have toward each other is examined. The family’s oldest daughter, Lydia, goes missing and is eventually found dead at the bottom of the local lake. The author approaches the family’s grief in a unique way – through the thoughts and emotions of all the family members. And a more dysfunctional family would be hard to find. They never speak to one another about the loss.
Understandably, the family members all take the death very hard but it is their decisions to act in selfish, narcissistic ways that are the most frustrating: Having affairs, ignoring other members of the family and generally being thoughtless; each struggling through their own identity crisis. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that grief affects people in diverse ways with varying degrees of misery. But this family was predisposed, as we learn while reading about the events that lead up to Lydia’s suicide.
The mystery for the reader is not whether Lydia Lee is dead or alive, or where she’s gone – we discover her whereabouts on the first page. We watch instead as the police come to the Lee’s home to ask uncomfortable questions: Was she doing well at school? Who were her friends? Did she seem depressed? Did she ever talk about hurting herself?
Her parents, sister and brother all find themselves unable to answer truthfully, they just don’t know. The mystery of the book is why they cannot bring themselves to tell one another, or the police, what they believe to be behind her vanishing. Ng brilliantly depicts the destruction that parents can inflict on their children and on each other all the while doing what they think is best. Marilyn is desperate for Lydia to become a doctor while James’s fondest hope is that Lydia will repress her racial heritage and be friends with all the right people. But, Lydia, as we learn in scenes from the past, cannot see herself becoming the all-American physician of her folks’ dreams. It is the pressure to do so that effectively kills her.
Some crime aficionados may find the novel short on twists and deaths but that is not this author’s forte. Ng is most impressive with the details and the what-ifs? As you can tell by my initial reaction this book is poignant and got my attention on an expressive level. While it is dark and depressing it is not a book to be missed. Well written and smooth flowing, Everything I Never told You is a thriller told from an unusual viewpoint. I give it a 3.7/5.
