Everything I Never Told You

“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.” 

The novel’s first three-word sentence informs us that the worst has already happened. The second sentence introduces a “they” who will be affected by Lydia’s death. The fact that the reader benefits from an omniscient narration that the characters are not privy to sets up an inequality of knowledge between the reader and the characters. We therefore have to judge them on how they act with their limited knowledge and lack of historical hindsight.

“But Lydia, defying genetics, somehow has her mother’s blue eyes, and they know this is one more reason she is their mother’s favorite. And their father’s, too.” 

Written in the time before Lydia’s death was confirmed to her siblings, this description is in the present tense, as though Lydia still lives. She is still the favorite child who eclipses Nath and Hannah both. While the passage states that the other siblings “know” that Lydia’s more White-passing appearance is another reason for Marilyn’s preferment, the novel in its entirety disrupts this “fact,” as it shows that it is James, not Marilyn, who is concerned with Whiteness.

“In the picture, Nath can’t distinguish the blue of her irises from the black of her pupils, her eyes like dark holes in the shiny paper. When he’d picked up the photos at the drugstore, he had regretted capturing this moment, the hard look on his sister’s face. But now, he admits […] this looks like her—at least, the way she looked when he had seen her last.” 

This passage illustrates the disparity between the Lee family’s idealized mental image of Lydia and the troubled girl she was at the time of her disappearance. Nath has a moment of disorientation as he wonders whether he captured Lydia at an inopportune moment in the picture.