Marilyn and James argue over the cause of Lydia’s death, if it was a murder or suicide.

In present day, Hannah wonders about her sister’s life. She leaves without explanation, tearing up a note to James that he pieces together. Marilyn realizes she still wants to be a doctor, and she plots to abandon her family and move to Toledo so she can finish her pre-med requirements. James takes Nath to the community pool and witnesses his son being the victim of racist harassment much like he has felt throughout his life. The narrative switches back to ten years prior to the present day when Marilyn begins to feel restless after her mother dies. She spends time searching Lydia’s room for answers and is only left with questions as she realizes she might not have known her daughter after all. Marilyn promises herself she will discover the truth about Lydia’s death. James drives to his office at the university where he teaches, and his young, Chinese American teaching assistant, Louisa, invites him back to her place for something to eat.

Their argument nearly comes to blows, but it is broken up by James. Their love affair seemed to erase their insecurities-his for being Chinese American, hers for being doomed to end up a homemaker like her mother-and Marilyn becomes pregnant with Nath, and she leaves Harvard and her medical school aspirations to marry James and start a family together.Īt Lydia’s funeral, Nath expresses his suspicions that their neighbor Jack was involved in Lydia’s death. To help answer this question, the narrator takes the reader back to the 1960s, when Marilyn and James met at Harvard when he was a young graduate student teaching a course that Marilyn took. Certain things do not add up: Why would Lydia row herself out to the middle of the lake if she cannot swim? Was it Lydia that Hannah heard leaving the house at 2 a.m.? As the novel opens, the reader sees that Lydia is a mystery to her family just as much as she is a mystery to the reader. The police are informed once the children go off to school, and eventually it is discovered that Lydia drowned in the lake nearby the Lee's house. Gradually, the Lees realize that their middle daughter, Lydia has not come down for breakfast and, in fact, nobody knows where she is. One spring day in 1977, Marilyn and James Lee sit down to breakfast with their son, Nath, and youngest daughter, Hannah. Through shifting perspectives and shifts in time, Everything I Never Told You explores the danger in silence and repression and the repercussions of never voicing how you really feel. After middle child Lydia disappears and is discovered dead at the bottom of a lake, the Lees will have to revisit painful memories that have contributed to extremely tense and fragile family dynamics. Everything I Never Told You examines the Lees, a middle class mixed-racial family in suburban 1970s Ohio.

Synopsis of everything i never told you