Everything I Never Told You

Early on, we see Lydia's room through her mother's eyes, and it's easy to think there are clues to Lydia's identity in what her mother observes. But, in a sense, everything in Lydia's room is an illusion filtered through the eyes of someone who fundamentally doesn't know her child. Only when the mother – Marilyn – looks closer does she really begin to see that the room is more Potemkin Village than anything else, signified by a row of empty diaries.

No one expresses their deepest fears and disappointments:

“If I'm not perfect, my parents might go away.”

“I've always felt different from everyone else, and so I can only love the things about my children that differ from me.”

“My life got sidetracked when I ended up following my mother's blueprint for my life, and so I must press my daughter to achieve her dreams, which are strangely the same as the ones I had for myself.”

“Why is the spotlight always on Lydia?”

The youngest child spends the whole novel observing and being able to do so because no one really interacts with her. She longs to reach out, to touch, to hug, but her family keeps moving out of her reach, either oblivious to her needs or irritated by them. She is hopefully destined to put her observational skills and empathy to good use.

It's under these conditions of lack of emotional honesty that tragedy happens.

The ending has a surprising amount of hope in it, which I'm not sure I buy, but because I've spent time with these people would hope is possible.