Everything I Never Told You

If you love to read about messy family dynamics and the multi-generational effects of personal trauma, this is 100% the book for you.

“Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off.”Marilyn Lee, on Lydia’s childhood.

Celeste Ng takes us into the brains of every single member of the Lee family in ‘Everything I Never Told You’. As you travel backwards and forwards through time, through different narratives and memories, you never lose track of the central question: “what happened to Lydia?”

This book is a testament to the brilliance of Ng’s story telling. Although you’re deep-diving into so many people’s experiences both related and unrelated to Lydia, you always find your way back to the main storyline seamlessly.

Beyond the expert story-weaving, Ng also excels at painting each setting with details that make it easy to visualize. This book transports you into every moment and you get to experience it as if you were there. I laughed, I cried, and I revelled in story-telling.

“Instead, they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.”

✏️ Favourite Quotes

1. “Dinnertime comes and goes, but none of them can imagine eating. It seems like something only people in films do, something lovely and decorative, that whole act of raising a fork to your mouth. Some kind of purposeless ceremony.”
2. “So they called it keeping house for a reason, Marilyn thought. Sometimes it did run away.”
3. “It was as if America herself was taking him in. It was too much luck.”
4. “Hannah curls up in her bed, sifting through each detail of the day: the white spot on each of her father’s knuckles as he grips the steering wheel; the tiny beads of sweat that clung to the minister’s upper lip, like dew; the soft thump the coffin made as it touched the bottom of the grave.”
5. “She thought of her mother, the life her mother had wanted for her, the lif eher mother had hoped to lead herself: husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order. Without meaning to, she’d acquired it. There was nothing more her mother could have wished her. The thought did not put her in a festive mood.”
6. “Everywhere she went, it was there. But every time her mother asked, she said yes, yes, yes.“
7. “He and his parents and their lives would spin into the space where she had been. They would be pulled into the vacuum she left behind.”
8. “Everything that loomed so large close up—school, their parents, their lives—all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing.”
9. “In the dark they are careful of each other, as if they know they are fragile, as if they know they can break.”

PS. If you’d like to watch me talk about books, I have a second YouTube channel that’s dedicated to my reading journey.