Everything I Never Told You,

Tragedy Foretold

Right at the start of Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, it is revealed that a girl called Lydia is dead.  As her family and the police hunt for the missing girl, whose body is found at the bottom of the lake, the story of her family and Lydia’s tragedy is gently unfolded,

The novel is set in the Seventies, but the issues of race and alienation of the ‘outsider’ never go away. Linda is the beloved daughter of a mixed race family—her father, the quietly courageous James is Chinese, her mother Marilyn is white. Lydia, with her blue eyes and blonde hair, looks like her mother, but that does not spare her the racist cruelty her siblings face.  Worse, the full force of her mother’s thwarted ambition is put on the fragile girl’s shoulders. Her brother Nathan plans on escaping, while her kid sister Hannah skulks around ignored by the family that didn’t want her. Her only friend is the town’s ‘bad boy’ Jack, but he has problems of her own.

As the cops come asking questions, it is revealed to her shocked and grief-stricken family that Lydia had been living a lie and trying to be the over-achieving daughter her parents wanted her to be, even if it killed her. It’s a heartbreaking story, which deftly combines the thrill of suspense with the melancholy of broken hearts. In the novel’s most moving scene, Marilyn finds a bunch of her daughter’s diaries, that she gifted to her each year, sure that Lydia wrote in them. Then, “With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. It will tell her, she thinks. Everything Lydia no longer can. Who she had been seeing. Why she had lied to them. Why she went down to the lake.

“The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. Nothing. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March. Every page is blank. She takes down 1976. 1975. 1974. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. All those years of her daughter’s life, unmarked. Nothing to explain anything.”

The novel was picked as Amazon’s Book of the Year for 2014, beating giants like Hilary Mantel and Stephen King, which is not a minor feat.

Everything I Never Told You

By Celeste Ng

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 297