EINTY

With the first two sentences of “Everything I Never Told You”, Celeste Ng comes in HOT. Ng writes, “Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet.” From the beginning, this is an example of a recipe. Any amateur baker or cook out there knows that the first piece of information given in a recipe is the final product. If a person were looking at a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, the first line would not be “bake 8 to 10 minutes”.

The idea of the recipe is to first reveal the final product, then tell the you the steps in order to get there. That is the technique that Ng employs with the first two lines of her book. Also, most recipes include a photograph of the finished product. This is shown in the photograph above. The cover of “Everything I Never Told You” is a picture of Lydia face down on the water. Before even picking the book up, you can see a lifeless body, and then by reading the book you become aware of how that happened. Just based off of the cover and the first two sentences, you now know that recipes will be in use throughout the story.

Celeste Ng is uses a recipe to tell her story. Early on, she sets the stage for the story by including the small detail about Lydia having her physics homework set. This small detail is the first of many subtle hints that Lydia may have had mental health issues. As the story progresses, more details about Lydia emerge, such as Marilyn’s discovery of condoms and cigarettes in Lydia’s room.

James and Marilyn also are not aware that Lydia is not truly friends with the girls that they thought she was, such as Karen Adler and Annie Hall. These instances are like ingredients in a recipe. Going back to the chocolate chip cookie example, eggs by themselves do not taste sweet

. Rather, they are disgusting. When added to sugars, butter, vanilla, flour, baking soda, salt, nuts and chocolate chips, they are an entirely different product and do taste sweet.

A small detail about being obsessed with academics may not seem like much, but when combined with so many other components, there is some substance to the detail. That is the connection between a recipe and a small detail in literature.