Theme Of Everything I Never Told You

There is a fine line between holding things back and keeping too many secrets, crossing it can result in disastrous things. In the book “Everything I Never told you” by Celeste Ng, this idea is explored in a captivating story of loss and family. Lydia Lee has just died, and no one knows what happened. As her family goes through many stages of grief and begins to investigate why such a thing happened, they begin to discover secrets no one could imagine. Lydia held things back, things that may have been the cause of her death. This is how secrets can result in disastrous events for not only those who keep them but those close to the keeper as well. By evaluating the structure of the story, we can break down these events into stages to improve

Danger of being too secretive, too distant, too far gone for anyone to help them. “That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved… This moment, Lydia thought. This is where it all went wrong,”(Ng 274). At this moment, Lydia is contemplating a time where she began to feel desolate. Looking back on it, she realizes this is where her life started to go wrong. She held these feelings back from everyone. Becoming more distant as time went on and continuing to cover it up so no one would know. By doing this she cut her family off and suffered alone in these secrets. While they piled up she continued to lie and ignore her potential support system, her family. This would permanently affect her and her family's lives and would cause the tragic event of her death. People often suffer in silence, not voicing their feelings and thoughts, thinking that everyone holds things back and has secrets. However, many do not understand that there is a difference between having some secrets and holding back too much. This causes their emotions and thoughts to build up, like they are with Lydia. Built up emotions can cause damage in people’s mental health, leading them to do disastrous things as a result. This would permanently affect her and her family's lives

“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. Whether she thought he'd failed her, or whether she wanted him to let her go. This, more than anything, makes him feel that she is gone,”(Ng. 290). Nate, Lydia’s brother, is only now realizing how catastrophic those secrets would become. Those secrets are the reason she died, by discovering those secrets and confronting them, maybe things would have been different. But he will never know. He will never know and now that she is dead, he is truly coming into the realization of this, causing him great despair. The event has finally happened, and it has wreaked havoc on many lives, all because of those secrets. This shows how the built up secrets, the things that were never told, caused this disastrous event of her death. Ethan is wrecked by her death, showing how it affected not only Lydia, the secret holder, but also those around her. This could have been prevented if Lydia understood what she was doing and if her family knew what to