Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in children and teens throughout the United States. However, it is not always easy to figure out if someone committed suicide or if their death was accidental. This was the case with Lydia Lee in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. Lydia, a 16-year-old high school student in Middlewood, Ohio, dies by drowning in a lake. She ventured out to the lake alone late one night and paddled a boat out so she could swim back to the dock, except she never made it to the dock. The novel explores the events leading up to and following her death and gives hints about what could’ve possibly caused her death. The coroner ruled it a suicide, but Ng ensured the readers this was because they couldn’t resolve whether it was suicide or accident and typically when that is in question, they go with suicide. Ng continuously makes the cause of Lydia’s death ambiguous by never explaining to the reader what occurred, or what Lydia’s thought processes were in the moments leading up to her death. However, if one were to study the various warning signs and risk factors for suicide they would find hints throughout the novel pointing towards Lydia committing suicide.
In order to examine the likelihood that someone would commit suicide, one must look at statistics about personal factors that the subject can’t change, such as race, gender, and current age. Shortly after Lydia’s death, Marilyn and James were arguing, and James spurted out, “‘If she were a white girl,’ he says, ‘none of this would ever have happened” (Ng 202). Statistically speaking, James could be right. According to Sally Curtin from the Center for Disease Control, Division of Vital Statistics, people that identify as non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander, which would be Lydia’s race, had a 7.3 suicide rate in 1999. In 2017, they had a suicide rate of
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