168. Everything I Never Told You

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Celeste Ng

Genre:  Fiction

304 pages, published August 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is certainly applicable to Everything I Never Told You which tells the story of an American family in the 1970’s.  Parents James and Marilyn and James Lee are an interracial couple.  James is Chinese and has always felt a desire to fit in.  Marilyn is a frustrated stay at home mother who abandoned her Medical School dreams when she got pregnant in college.  Together, James and Marilyn pour all of their expectations and unattained dreams into Lydia, their oldest daughter, with tragic consequences.

Quotes 

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you–whether because you didn’t get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”

 

“It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.”

 

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”

 

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.”

 

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”

 

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”

 

“Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, “Show me again, show me another.” Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.”

 

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

 

“You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.”

 

“Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.”

 

“He can guess, but he won’t ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she’d never told him.”

My Take

In Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng tells a compelling story about a dysfunctional family and the dangers of parents who try to work out their own issues through their children.  Ng makes you feel the incredible weight that parental expectations can place on a child.  In my own life, as both a child and a parent, I have had to navigate this difficult terrain.  While we all want to please our parents and see our children succeed (at least most of us do).  We need be true to ourselves and give our children the freedom to do the same.