Everything I Never Told You

Books are a continual motif in the novel that symbolize the weight of the parental expectations on Lydia. Importantly, Lydia never chooses the books that fall into her hands and influence her. Rather, she encounters them, either in the form of gifts or evidence left by her parents.

In the aftermath of Marilyn’s departure, Lydia becomes conscious of a red Betty Crocker cookbook, which was the only possession of her mother’s that Marilyn salvaged. The book has many layers of interpretation. At the text level, it is filled with platitudes about happy domesticity and mother-daughter bonding, such as, “What mother doesn’t love to cook with her little girl?” (136). For Lydia, Marilyn is the answer to this question, because her mother has not only left home but filled the book’s pages with tearstains. Lydia then decides that since domesticity makes Marilyn sad, should Marilyn come home, Lydia will sacrifice herself to make her happy. Lydia hides the book and the evidence of her mother’s sadness, telling Marilyn that she has “lost it” (147). However, an ecstatic Marilyn interprets Lydia’s loss of the book as an iconoclastic destruction of the object and its ideals of domesticity.

Marilyn proceeds to reward her daughter for this act by filling her shelves with science-based tomes. Over the years, Lydia grows to silently resent these books that feel more like obligations than delights when she receives them on Christmases and birthdays. It is only after Lydia’s death that Marilyn realizes that the “heavy” science books were “everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway” (247). Unconsciously, Marilyn bought the books not for her daughter but for the unrealized version of herself.

James makes his own addition to Lydia’s book collection when he gives her Dale Carnegie’s self-help guide How to Win Friends and Influence People. James’s gift speaks to his own lost wishes of being popular and accepted. For James, the book is a magical object, as he fantasizes that if he had it when he was younger, then “everything would have been different […] perhaps he’d have fit in at Lloyd, he’d have charmed Marilyn’s mother, they’d have hired him at Harvard” (177). James entertains the notion that with White male author Carnegie’s techniques, everyone can win people over and fit in. In doing so, he seeks to deny his underlying dread that people who do not look like Carnegie are automatically disadvantaged in social situations. Although Lydia does not know the details of James’s social exclusion, when she receives the book, she feels “the ache of it all, deep and piercing as a foghorn,” and pretends that she is popular, concealing rather than addressing her friendlessness (177).

Finally, there are the empty lock-and-key journals that Marilyn gave Lydia prior to her disappearance. However, Lydia, who has gotten into the habit of existing to please others, finds that she has nothing of her own to write. The empty diary pages symbolize her restricted autonomy and reinforce the idea that she is a mystery to her family.