Because of this, Nathan becomes jealous of Lydia and one day pushes her into the lake even though she cannot swim. During Marilyn's absence, James began favoring Lydia and bullying Nathan, whom James perceives to be as friendless as James was in childhood. Instead, Marilyn encourages Lydia to become a doctor, aggressively training her in math and science. She returns home and realizes that she will never have the will to abandon her children and pursue a career again. Marilyn's absence lasts nine weeks, during which time she discovers that she is pregnant with a third child, Hannah. James believes that she has left because he and the children are Asian, and that she no longer wants to deal with the societal pressure of being outsiders. Marilyn then abandons her family to pursue her academic studies. While doing so, she realizes that she became a homemaker, as her mother had always desired. Upon receiving news of her estranged mother's death, Marilyn returns to her childhood home in Virginia to deal with her mother's possessions. Marilyn intended to resume her studies to become a doctor after her son, Nathan, was born, but after her second pregnancy, with Lydia, she remained a homemaker for eight years. Discovering she was pregnant, Marilyn arranged for a quick marriage to James and was angry when her mother tried to stop the wedding after seeing that James was of Asian descent. When she met James and recognized the racist treatment he had been enduring, Marilyn felt a kinship with him and the two began a relationship. Marilyn grew up disgusted by her homemaker mother (who taught home economics at her high school) and longed to become a doctor. After graduation, James failed to secure a faculty position at Harvard, so he accepted an offer from the fictional Middlewood College in Ohio. He met Marilyn in 1957 when he was a doctoral candidate at Harvard teaching a class on American culture in which she was a student. James, the academically gifted child of Chinese immigrants, spent his life yearning to belong. The death of Lydia leads James and Marilyn to reflect on their lives.

As the police investigate, her parents discover that, contrary to their belief that Lydia was popular and doing well in school, she was actually very lonely with almost no friends and that her grades had severely slipped. Lydia's parents, James and Marilyn, are horrified by their daughter's death. After several days, her body is dredged out of the town lake. On May 3, 1977, Lydia Lee, the middle child of the Lee family, is missing. Ng spent six years writing the novel, going through four different full drafts.

The novel is about a mixed-race Chinese-American family whose middle daughter Lydia is found drowned in a nearby lake. The novel topped Amazon's Best Books of the Year list for 2014. Book by Celeste Ng Everything I Never Told YouĮverything I Never Told You is the 2014 debut novel by Celeste Ng.

Everything j never told you