Everything I Never Told You

Ng’s book begins like a typical crime novel, with the disappearance of a young woman and a family calling the police. By the end of the first chapter, Lydia’s body is dragged from the lake, revealing she died from the stereotypically feminine death by water, like Ophelia from Hamlet and the writer Virginia Woolf. Given water’s association with tears, as with Ophelia and Woolf, there is the suggestion that unbearable emotions caused Lydia to sink.

Both Marilyn, who puts a safety lock on the door, and Nath, who thinks that reputed lothario Jack Wolff is somehow involved, unconsciously desire a reason for Lydia’s death that lies outside their troubled family. They crave the cliché of a lunatic or a head-turning seducer so they do not have to face up to their own responsibility in Lydia’s death. The narrative pretends to satisfy Nath’s suspicion, as it reports Jack’s disheveled appearance at the funeral and his careless behavior with girls, whereby he is “known to make a specialty out of deflowering virgins” and quickly tiring of them afterward (65). Nath, who assumes that Lydia was one of Jack’s many conquests, divines that Jack had “hurt her somehow” (65).