45 pages • 1 hour read
Mikki Daughtry, Rachael LippincottAll This Time
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fact Versus Fiction
In All This Time, Daughtry and Lippincott play with the blurred lines between fact and fiction. Before the coma, Kyle lies to himself in an attempt to make his life seem perfect. He creates his own fiction through perception. He sees his relationship with Kimberly as ideal, a literal teenage dream: He plays football; she’s a cheerleader. He also sees his friendship with Sam as unbreakable, with Kyle, Sam, and Kimberly making a trifecta that supports Kyle. Though he has to deal with fact, such as the reality of his football career ending, he still idealizes the people in his life and his own future. Kyle doesn’t like to deal with uglier realities, so he creates a fictitious perception of a dreamy teenage life.
Kyle is prompted into another fantasy during his coma. He believes he is living a new life with Marley, getting over Kim’s death, and finding opportunities to live a happy life. When Kyle comes out of the coma, he discovers that this life was just a fantasy. It feels incredibly real to him, even as he acknowledges his coma.
Marley fed him his fantasies through her storytelling. This demonstrates the power of storytelling as potentially more influential than reality. Kyle’s fantasy life in his coma was a version of unrealistic perfection. Still, Kyle would prefer to live in a perfect narrative than in a difficult reality. When Kyle comes out of the coma, Marley’s stories linger. Kyle now struggles between two realities: The one Marley created for him and the one that truly exists.
Daughtry and Lippincott challenge the reader’s conceptions of truth. If Kyle experienced Marley’s fictions as reality, then isn’t fiction its own version of truth? The lines between fact and fiction are blurred in Kyle’s psyche; he experiences Marley’s stories as reality.
Kyle continues the cycle of blurring narrative realities. When Marley goes into her own coma, Kyle uses her stories to connect with her subconscious. Because the stories are so real to him, the narrative focus shifts into those stories as though they are real-life. Once Kyle reaches Marley in their fictitious world, they find one another on an equal fantasy playing field. Kyle tells his own story to help convince Marley not to succumb to death. In this novel, fiction saves lives in ways that facts cannot.
All This Time is both a fairy tale and a subversion of fairy tale tropes. Fairy tales are neat narratives in which Prince Charming saves the damsel in distress. Fairy tales are labeled as “tales” because they are far-fetched, unrealistic, and steeped in neat symbolism. In this novel, the fairy tale story of Marley and Kyle is treated as a reality, though a messy one. Their story demonstrates that even fantastical tales can be as real as factual life.
Grief and Guilt
In All This Time, multiple characters are mired by grief and guilt. Kyle’s guilt stems from the death of Kimberly, which he experiences as real in his coma. For Kyle, Kimberly’s death represents the injustice of life and its imperfections . It is impossible for him to accept his survival while Kim is dead. He blames himself for her death even though she died in a car accident. Kyle struggles with his grief. He sees signs of Kimberly everywhere. She flashes on his sofa, as though haunting him. He hears her on the phone and finds her belongings as though a ghost has been moving them around. These hauntings demonstrate that Kyle can’t comprehend Kim’s death; his grief is playing tricks with his perception.
In his coma, Kyle learns how to move forward with his life. His mother and Sam encourage him to think of his present and future with positivity. Kyle learns that living his best life is actually honoring Kim’s death, not dismissing it. The mantra “Always forward” informs his process, but it is still a slow and painful one.
When Kyle comes out of his coma and discovers that Kim has always been alive, he experiences grief all over again: His perfect life with Marley is gone. Kyle feels bad because he’s not happy to see Kimberly, having moved beyond his relationship with her after coming to terms with her death. Kyle thus endures two different experiences with grief and guilt. The second experience, the loss of his fantasy life with Marley, is more difficult in that he has no one to help support him through the loss of a dream. No one can understand how vivid this fantasy was and the ways in which Kyle experienced the dream as reality. He is isolated and alone.
Marley also suffers from grief and guilt. She is grieving her twin sister, a phenomenal loss. Twins are intimately linked from before birth; the loss of Laura is also a loss of Marley. Marley’s grief is so deep that she doesn’t speak and the only joy she finds is through writing stories. Marley is also mired by guilt because she witnessed her sister’s death and didn’t help her. Marley froze as the car approached her sister; she blames herself for Laura’s death. Marley must learn how to forgive herself before she can give herself permission to live a happier life.
Kyle and Marley are connected by their mutual experiences with grief and guilt. They are one another’s strongest allies and understand each other. Ultimately, they save one another.
Acclimating to Change
Change is an inherent part of life, but also one of the most challenging aspects of being a human. Kyle is very averse to change, but life teaches him that he must acclimate in order to live a fulfilling life. The first change Kyle struggles with is the dissolution of his perfect life with Kimberly. He and Kimberly had attempted to break up several times throughout high school, but he managed to mend whatever argument they had. Kyle is scared of change and couldn’t picture his life without Kim. Kim’s choice to attend Berkeley feels like a betrayal, in part because Kyle has to change his vision of the future. Her revelation before the car accident that she wants to break up with Kyle leads to a full freak out: Kyle doesn’t want his life to change.
The car accident forces transformation. Kyle has no choice but to learn how to deal with a life without Kim. The psychological and physical injuries from the accident force Kyle to reimagine his future. He finally comes to terms with the loss of his football career and dives into sports journalism. He finds a new friend in Marley, a friendship that blossoms into a relationship. Good things happen to Kyle because he embraces change instead of fighting it. But Kyle is dealt another blow when he learns that all of this change was a fantasy. Kyle has to start his acclimation to change all over again when he comes out of his coma.
Despite all the lessons he learned in his first experience with upheaval, Kyle resists change again. He refuses to give up on his life with Marley even though he acknowledges that it only existed in his mind. He even has a hard time accepting that Kim is alive because he spent so much energy moving past her death. The rug is pulled out from underneath him once again; the pain of multiple losses and reconstructions challenges his character.
Daughtry and Lippincott emphasize how flexibility is an important coping tactic. Life is unpredictable and can be disappointing, and we need to be able to roll with the punches. Kyle finally accepts that there is only so much he can control; he must embrace change and let go of the control that limits his connections with other people.
