Character Cooking: An Art of Recipes

Character Cooking: An Art of Recipes

Baking a narrative, like any recipe, requires specific ingredients and techniques. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng, chronicles the struggles and inner workings of a family that has lost a child, making it perfect proof of a combination of systems, mechanisms, and formulas hidden in authorial choices. If the definition of a recipe is observed as “a series of ingredients and instructions leading to an expected outcome”, these methods can be easily identified in Ng’s writing. The conflict between Marilyn’s recipe for a successful life and her mother’s builds Marilyn’s character and is the reason for her restlessness and unhappiness.  

Doris Walker, Marilyn’s mother, is the first of the characters to follow a recipe in the hope of creating a lady’s ideal life. Despite having all the necessary elements and being an expert housewife, Mrs. Walker was ultimately unsuccessful, and became a pitiful image of what could have been. Her recipe was simple and achievable, consisting of three main ingredients: a home, a husband, and children. When combined and balanced, those three pieces would form the life expected of and sought by women in the forties and fifties. 

We know little of Mrs. Walker’s early life other than she was a skilled cook, housekeeper, and entertainer; she was thoroughly prepared for the life she wanted, and with a husband and daughter, had essentially attainted it. Only when her husband leaves for good does this dream evaporate into thin air. Instead of spiraling in despair, Mrs. Walker clings to the image she built for herself and never wavers. Marilyn remembers “her mother’s insistence on changing clothes before dinner, though there was no longer a husband to impress with her fresh face and crisp housedress” (Ng 28). She continues this empty act for the rest of her life, resolute in her ways, as though it is the only thing holding her together. Little did she know that the botched result of a perfect recipe would become the insurmountable divide between her and her daughter.

A stellar student and trailblazing rebel, Marilyn had everything she needed to reach her dream, yet her progress was cut short by marriage and children. Like her mother’s, her recipe was straightforward and, miraculously, feasible. It was comprised of getting good grades, going to college, and applying to medical school, all in order to achieve her goal of becoming a doctor. 

In high school, she was at the top of her class, setting the curve for every physics test. Even as a sophomore Marilyn was radical: she asked to be switched from home economics, a required course for girls her age, to shop - a request unheard of at the time. Above all, she loved surprising those who thought her aspirations were ludicrous for a woman. While taking chemistry at Radcliffe College, “her results were the most accurate; her lab reports the most complete. By midterm, she set the curve for every exam, and the instructor had stopped smirking” (Ng 27). With an outstanding resume and unyielding momentum, she was equipped to complete her education in a matter of years. 

During her junior year, all is suddenly halted when Marilyn leaves school to get married and have a child, naively thinking she can resume her studies at a later time without a hitch. Fast forward eight years, she finally makes her future a priority. But after having spent all that time managing a household of five “she couldn't remember how to write a paper, how to take notes; it seemed as vague and hazy as something she had done in a dream” (Ng 77). Instead of demotivating her, this realization renews her drive to reach her goal and have a life different from her mother’s.

Marilyn’s abhorrence for her mother’s existence and ambitions is the singular most driving force in her life. Whether because she saw how poorly it could end or because she thinks herself better, Marilyn is propelled by Mrs. Walker’s pathetic feminine ideal to create her own path, her own recipe. She chooses to become a doctor because “it was the furthest thing she could imagine from her mother's life, where sewing a neat hem was a laudable accomplishment and removing beet stains from a blouse was a cause for celebration” (Ng 30). She hates the idea of being reduced to a simple “homemaker", so picks the polar opposite: a powerful, respectable career. 

In a moment of reflection, she realizes she has acquired what she loathes most: “the life her mother had wanted for her, the life her mother had hoped to lead herself: husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order” (Ng 78). This is the source of Marilyn’s discontent and restlessness; she is furious with herself, not only for letting her dream slip by, but for falling into the role she promised to escape. 

Consequently, when Dr. Wolff, being a female doctor of the same age as Marilyn, proves to her a different outcome is still possible, she makes plans to finish her degree. Every night thereafter, she does a motivational reading of the Betty Crocker cookbook, the epitome of her “mother’s small and lonely life” to remind herself “You don't want this, there will be more to your life than this” (Ng 97). The fact that she then leaves her family to once again pursue her studies affirms that her true purpose is to defy what her mother represented and to prove she is capable of making her dream a reality.

The two recipes at play, one failed and the other interrupted, are so staunch in their foundation that their conflict drives a character, and therefore the plot, forward. Though they may merely be literary devices, they reveal to us more than just the core force in Marilyn: just like cooking recipes, life recipes don't always work out. And just like cooking recipes, life recipes are tweaked or revamped by each generation. For the sake of peace, harmony, and healthy relationships, you shouldn't resist that change, or you'll trade development for discord.