Everything I Never Told You

Following Marilyn’s disappearance in the summer of 1966, Lydia becomes the favorite child of both her parents, as she embodies the potential for the career and social success they lack. At the beginning of the novel, Nath and Lydia consider that despite her jet-black hair, Lydia resembles her White mother to the extent that “you’d see one in the corner of your eye and mistake her for the other” (3). However, as the novel progresses, there are increasing references to Lydia’s experience of the world as a non-White person. A newspaper report refers to her standing out “as one of only two Orientals at Middlewood High,” while Lydia confides in Jack that she feels so “incongruous” in her White surroundings that she dissociates from her appearance (110; 193). Thus, Lydia suffers from standing out and being excluded as much as James does, and she feels the additional burden of pretending to fit in to please him. Lydia, caught between her father’s desire and her mother’s competing wish regarding her academics and career, feels impossibly trapped and isolated. She reasons that “if her mother let her go out like the other girls […] it might not matter what she looked like […] Or if she looked like everyone else, perhaps it would not matter that she had to study all the time” (227).