Out of the Frying Pan, Ng to the Fire

To make a Celeste Ng story, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In a medium-sized bowl, mix flour, eggs, and a sense that living isn’t enough. Cook for fifty minutes or until actively on fire. The structure of Ng’s Everything I Never Told You closely resembles that of a recipe: placing the end product at the beginning and moving through a set of instructions to reach this result. By starting the novel with Lydia’s death, Ng creates a recipe of loss for readers –– naming the intended product, Lydia’s suicide; the ingredients, the events leading to her death; and the chefs, Lydia’s grieving family.

Hint: Ng's work is the burned one.

Like all recipes, Ng begins her story by naming the dish she wants to make: Lydia’s death. The first two sentences of the novel also say where it plans to go, asserting, “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” By emphasizing the Lee family’s ignorance, Ng creates secretiveness in the reader –– as if her audience knows something the characters don’t. (For instance, everything Lydia never told them). From there, Ng shifts from how Lydia is dead to why. Like a step-by-step recipe, Ng outlines the routines of the Lee family: describing the routine of breakfast before school. Each action is familiar, from the “sharpened pencil [placed with] Lydia’s physics homework” to the imaginary Lydia that her mother hopes to see, “a grumpy lump bundled under the bedspread that she’d somehow missed before.” Ng’s characters act using normal rhythms of routine, ignorant of their dead daughter at the bottom of the lake. With her ending as the introduction, Ng creates distinct roles for reader and character: creating a recipe whose intent is known to the readers and unknown for characters.

Beginning? Ending? One and the same. (If they exist at all.)

After this exposition, the novel goes through a step-by-step process of how Lydia’s death could occur. The recipe is one of loss: how the events in one town from one family led to one girl floating at the bottom of Middlewood Lake. Ng places readers alongside the Lee family in their investigation, giving a sequential examination of Lydia’s demise. At first, the investigation goes nowhere, with Marilyn pleading that the police investigators recognize that Lydia was “very happy. She loved school. She could have done anything. She’d never go out in that boat by herself.” The insistence falls with the investigation, which unearths Lydia’s life through small discrepancies: Nath realizes that Lydia’s association with Jack made her “always upset… upset about everything” and that every friend he can list from Lydia’s life knows nothing about her. The events before Lydia’s death are like a recipe for a miserable cake –– each step of the story relies on what came before.

Although Lydia seemed happy, her relationship with Jack probably went something like this.

Ng’s final element of the recipe-novel is the characters within it –– Lydia's family and friends, who both cause the tragedy and try to make sense of it. Placing backstory alongside the investigation, Ng creates sub-recipes for each character: how Marilyn becomes the worried mother, convinced that her daughter’s death is the result of a kidnapper; and how events in James’s past predict his affair with his teaching assistant. Alongside the recipe of Lydia’s death lie several recipes of life, telling “How it began… Like everything: with mothers and fathers.” From page one, the results are already known: Marilyn marries James, has children Nath, Lydia, and Hannah, and copes with the loss of her middle child. But after this fact, Ng backtracks, describing Marilyn’s complicated relationship with her mother. This part of Marilyn’s character, scorning “her mother’s life, where sewing a neat hem was a laudable accomplishment and removing beet stains from a blouse was cause for celebration,” acts as step one in the recipe of Marilyn’s development. Following recipe structure, the yield is known far before the steps to get there: “She [Marilyn] thought of her mother, the life her mother had wanted for her, the life her mother had wanted to lead herself: husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order. Without meaning to, she’d acquired it.”

Recipe-style backstory –– giving the result of a character’s actions before the actions themselves –– is repeated for James, unfolding the recipe of his life as he tries to interpret his children’s. James, who readers know will marry Marilyn and have an affair with his teaching assistant, begins his recipe as a graduate student desperate to seem Americanized. Although James initially rejects the advances of Marilyn, who is then his student, he pursues a relationship with her immediately after this power dynamic is negated: “The next day, Marilyn came to his [James’s] office hours to tell him that she’d dropped the class. Within a week they were lovers.” The cycle of student-teacher affairs provides foundation for James’s future role in the novel: the middle-aged professor with a wife, children, and an affair with a teaching assistant much younger than him. Placing the end result of James’s life –– a dead daughter and an indecorous relationship –– before the beginning closely follows the structure of a recipe, giving readers a vision of the intended product before describing the process itself.

Imitating the messy structure of life, Ng uses a recipe structure to create an equally messy yet strategic novel: letting readers to know the end product before they’ve even begun. But the truths of Everything I Never Told You lie not in what happened, but how. Through the gradual accumulation of discoveries, the secret to Lydia’s death unfolds slowly, with all the patience of a baker at his yule log cake. By using a recipe structure, Ng creates a step-by-step process for Lydia's death: forcing readers and characters to experience her loss a second time.

Not even a memory.

Photos via here, here, here, and here.