Everything I Never Told You

Books are a continual motif in the novel that symbolize the weight of the parental expectations on Lydia. Importantly, Lydia never chooses the books that fall into her hands and influence her. Rather, she encounters them, either in the form of gifts or evidence left by her parents.

In the aftermath of Marilyn’s departure, Lydia becomes conscious of a red Betty Crocker cookbook, which was the only possession of her mother’s that Marilyn salvaged. The book has many layers of interpretation. At the text level, it is filled with platitudes about happy domesticity and mother-daughter bonding, such as, “What mother doesn’t love to cook with her little girl?” (136). For Lydia, Marilyn is the answer to this question, because her mother has not only left home but filled the book’s pages with tearstains. Lydia then decides that since domesticity makes Marilyn sad, should Marilyn come home, Lydia will sacrifice herself to make her happy. Lydia hides the book and the evidence of her mother’s sadness, telling Marilyn that she has “lost it” (147). However, an ecstatic Marilyn interprets Lydia’s loss of the book as an iconoclastic destruction of the object and its ideals of domesticity.

Marilyn proceeds to reward her daughter for this act by filling her shelves with science-based tomes.