Everything, Everything

“Immediately my mind goes to outer space. I picture a giant mother ship hovering in the skies above us.” 

The image of outer space emphasizes the distance Madeline feels from the outside world due to her confinement inside. Comparing Olly’s family’s arrival to an alien “mother ship” reinforces that feeling of distance and foreignness. The space imagery also foreshadows her childhood dream related in the diary entry of the next section.

“A single breath more, and my life will finally, finally explode.” 

The image of a balloon expanding and then exploding is symbolic of a deep tension in Madeline’s life between her illness and her desire for a normal teenage life. The balloon is white, in keeping with Yoon’s symbolic use of that color, and expresses Madeline’s desire for her repetitive life to be disrupted in some way (to explode). The idea that the balloon can only hold so much air before bursting also reinforces the idea that Madeline is nearing the limit of what she can endure without making a change.

“For the thousandth time I realize anew how hard my disease is on her. It’s the only world I’ve known, but before me she had my brother and my dad. She traveled and played soccer. She had a normal life that did not include being cloistered in a bubble for fourteen hours a day with her sick teenage daughter. I hold her and let her hold me for a few more minutes. She’s taking this disappointment much harder than I am.” 

This passage reveals several important aspects of the dynamic between Madeline and Pauline. Madeline is constantly aware of the sacrifices that Pauline makes to keep her safe and to provide a family relationship, and Madeline generally views those sacrifices as greater than her own. She also views her mom as being more emotionally affected by her illness than she is (see Important Quote 23 for another example of this). However, the passage also suggests that by sequestering herself so extremely with Madeline, by cutting herself off from people and things she used to enjoy, Pauline is protecting herself from having to form new relationships and attachments. Pauline justifies this by convincing herself that Madeline needs her presence constantly.

“Madeline: I don’t have a nickname. Everyone calls me Madeline. Sometimes my mom calls me honey or sweetie. Does that count?

Olly: no of course it doesn’t count. no one calls you m or maddy or mad or maddy-mad-mad-mad? i’ll pick one for you…we’re gonna be friends.” 

This online conversation between Madeline and Olly builds the foundation for their later relationship. Olly helps Madeline reinvent her identity to some extent by giving her a nickname (he begins referring to her as “Maddy”), a gesture of intimacy and affection that indicates he feels close to her. His appraisal of Pauline’s endearments “not counting” as nicknames also hints that his presence in Madeline’s life will usurp Pauline’s, which is what happens when Madeline travels to New York over Pauline’s protests at the end of the book.

“I like to think that I’m an exact fifty-fifty mixture of my mom and dad. My warm brown skin is what you get by mixing her pale olive skin with his richer dark brown. My hair is big and long and wavy, not as curly as his, but not as straight as hers. Even my eyes are a perfect blend—neither Asian nor African but somewhere in between.”

Madeline views her appearance as a mix between her mother and her deceased father. The descriptions of their physical characteristics imply that Madeline’s father was African American and that Pauline is Asian. Madeline’s appearance is one of the only connections she feels to her father, of whom she doesn’t have any memories due to his death early in her life.

“Me in love would be like a food critic with no taste buds. It would be like being a color-blind painter.” 

Madeline considers herself inhibited when it comes to love, much like a food critic who lacks the physical capacity to taste food when those senses are so central to the job. This assumption reveals that Madeline doesn’t just associate her illness with the lack of opportunity to experience everyday life; she believes that her illness reflects her ultimate inability to be attractive to someone else. Her self-esteem has become profoundly intertwined with her sense of physical health, another belief that she gradually sheds as the book progresses.

“The wanting scares me. It’s like a weed that spreads slowly, just beneath your notice. Before you know it, it’s pitted your surfaces and darkened your windows. […] One thing I’m certain of: Wanting just leads to more wanting. There’s no end to desire.” 

Because she has been disappointed by other people in the past, Madeline has trained herself not to desire intimate human connection outside of her mother and Carla. This passage uses the imagery of an invasive weed damaging everything around it to express Madeline’s fear of unchecked desire. She fears desire that doesn’t have an “end” because her illness places such strict boundaries around acceptable and unacceptable experiences.

“Maybe we can’t predict everything, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly. It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster.” 

At this stage in the book, Madeline has acknowledged her romantic feelings for Olly despite her earlier concerns about being vulnerable to abandonment. She expects that the relationship might bring her heartache, change, and risk, but she views that as a chance worth taking. This is a major theme of the middle of the book until Madeline ultimately rejects Olly by breaking up with him after returning from Hawaii.

“He wasn’t quite sure what any of it meant, only that his dad seemed to love Olly and Kara and his mom a little less than he did before. And the less he seemed to love them, the more they tried to become more lovable.”

Olly has been recounting his dad’s abusive behavior to Madeline, describing how as a young boy he struggled to understand his dad’s descent into alcoholism and abuse. The dynamic described in the passage illustrates several important characteristics of abusive relationships: Victims tend to think the abuse is somehow their fault and attempt to correct their own behavior. The more rejection they receive from the abuser, the more they try to gain the abuser’s affection. The quote reveals how damaging this abuse is to Olly.

“‘He’s not yours. Maybe he has time for you right now, but he’s going to go back to school soon. He’s going to meet some girl, and he’s going to be her Olly. You understand me?’

I know she’s just trying to protect me, just as I was trying to protect myself a few short weeks ago, but her words make me aware that the heart in my chest is a muscle like any other. It can hurt.

‘I understand,’ I say quietly.

‘Spend some time with your mother. Boys come and go, but mothers are forever.’” 

Carla gives Madeline contradictory advice throughout the book. At first, she thinks there’s no harm in Madeline getting to know Olly and having him come to the house, even telling Madeline that love can’t kill her. She willingly deceives Pauline by keeping Olly’s visits a secret. As Madeline and Olly’s relationship deepens, however, Carla encourages Madeline to pull away from him and to reinvest in her relationship with her mother.

“I want to answer, but I find that I can’t. I shake my head and look back down at our hands. We remain that way, sliding between certainty and uncertainty and back again until we hear Carla’s approach and are forced to part. I am made. I am unmade.” 

This passage describes the storm of emotions stirred up in Madeline when she and Olly hold hands for the first time. Her feelings are intense and seemingly contradictory—she is “made” and yet “unmade,” and experiences “certainty and uncertainty.” These feelings reveal that although the relationship and her feelings for Olly are new territory, they also feel natural and authentic, “making” her into the person she has always been inside herself. Their relationship, then, is both a new adventure and an expression of her deepest self, making her willingness to upend her life for it more understandable.

“He squeezes my hand and my lips part and we’re tasting each other. He tastes like salted caramel and sunshine. Or what I think salted caramel and sunshine taste like. He tastes like nothing I’ve ever experienced, like hope and possibility and the future. […] ‘Is it always like that?’ I ask, breathless.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s never like that.’ I hear the wonder in his voice.

And just like that, everything changes.” 

The passage describes Madeline and Olly’s first kiss and the sensations Madeline feels as they kiss. Though it’s clear that Olly is more experienced than she is, he still feels something special with her, just as she experiences something special with him. This adds to the feeling of emotional intimacy in their relationship in addition to physical closeness. Madeline also associates Olly’s “taste” with abstract ideas (“hope and possibility and the future”), reinforcing their emotional closeness and the sense of possibility she feels by participating in the relationship.

“I stifle the urge to go back to the window and assess my competition. But it’s not a competition if one person can’t even show up for the event. And it doesn’t matter what she looks like. […] It matters that she feels the sun on her skin. She breathes unfiltered air. It matters that she lives in the same world as Olly, and I don’t. I never will.”

This passage gives voice to the despair that Madeline feels when she contemplates the lives of “healthy” people compared to her own. To her, physical health and the ability to go outside trumps any quality she could hope to possess, despite Olly’s faithfulness to her. This quote also emphasizes how Madeline’s self-image is influenced by her supposed sickness—she believes that “it doesn’t matter” what the other girl looks like or what her personality is because Olly will automatically prefer someone who can live a “normal” teenage life.

“She seems to belong on that beach with those people more than she belongs stuck here in this room with me.”

Madeline’s guilt over keeping her mother sequestered with her reappears in this passage. The quote also expresses her feeling that Pauline’s sense of identity is centered around Madeline’s father and brother in a way that Madeline can’t relate to because she doesn’t remember them. This foreshadows the ultimate revelation that the trauma of their deaths profoundly impacts Pauline even decades later.

“I almost wish I hadn’t met him. How am I supposed to go back to my old life, my days stretching out before me with unending and brutal sameness? How am I supposed to go back being The Girl Who Reads? Not that I begrudge my life in books. All I know about the world I’ve learned from them. But a description of a tree is not a tree, and a thousand paper kisses will never equal the feel of Olly’s lips against mine.”

This passage underscores the fact that Madeline relied on books to experience the world before she met Olly, a reliance that becomes inadequate as she actually experiences life, love, and heartbreak. This change is one of the main arcs that Madeline’s character undergoes in the story. She eventually channels this dissatisfaction into making decisions that improve her life, like overriding her mother’s concerns to go to New York and find Olly.

“I want to tell him that it’s his fault that I’m out here. That love opens you up to the world. I was happy before I met him. But I’m alive now, and those are not the same thing.”

Madeline recognizes that her existence before Olly offered physical protection and stability, which she equated with happiness. With him in her life, however, she experiences a wider range of emotions from sadness to elation. She realizes that this range of emotional experience is part of the human condition and of loving relationships.

“[The ocean is] bluer, bigger, more turbulent than I’d imagined. Wind lifts my hair, scrubs sand and salt against my skin, invades my nose. […] I roll up my jeans as far as they’ll go. The sand is hot and dry and loose. It waterfalls over my feet and slips through my toes.

As I get closer to the water, the sand changes. Now it sticks to my feet, coating them like a second skin. At the water’s edge, it changes again and becomes a liquid velvet. My feet leave impressions in this softer mix.

Finally, my feet are in my surging water, and then my ankles are, and then my calves. I don’t stop moving until the water is up to my knees and soaks my jeans.

‘Be careful,’ Olly calls out from somewhere behind me.

I’m not sure what that means in this context. Be careful because I may drown? Be careful because I may get sick? Be careful because once you become a part of the world it becomes a part of you, too?

Because there’s no denying it now. I’m in the world.

And, too, the world is in me.” 

Madeline wades into the ocean for the first time in Hawaii, a momentous experience after all the years she’s longed to do so. She realizes that physical experience helps people connect more fully to the world around them, an element that was lacking in her life in California. Her intense observation—for example, noting the different types of sand as she gets closer to the water—and exhilaration emphasize the novelty of this experience for her.

“I look up into his eyes and what I see there makes me feel like I’m not wearing any clothing at all. My heart picks up the pace and I take a deep breath to try to slow it down, but it doesn’t work.

He runs his hands along the length of my arms, slowly pulling me toward him at the same time. He touches his forehead to mine when we’re finally close enough. His eyes are blue fire.

He looks like a starving man, like he could devour me all at once.

‘That swimsuit,’ he begins.

‘Is small,’ I conclude.” 

Madeline and Olly acknowledge their sexual attraction to each other as she puts on a swimsuit and observes her body in a piece of clothing that’s more revealing than anything she’s worn before. The intensity of Olly’s feelings are conveyed by the “blue fire” of his eyes and the comparison to starving. Madeline is excited by his reaction to her, as her racing heart demonstrates.

“I wave back and then close my eyes to take stock of my situation, because jumping off a cliff seems like a pivotal moment where a little stock-taking should be done. Strangely, though, I find I don’t really want to think too much. Like Olly, I just want to jump. I search out Olly’s face in the water and find him waiting for me. Considering what the future may hold, jumping off the cliff doesn’t seem so scary at all.”

Another arc that Madeline undergoes is the journey from pure intellect to physicality. In this passage her first instinct is to think about whether to jump off the cliff, but she decides she “[doesn’t] really want to think too much” and finds that “she just wants to jump,” a departure from her prior logical caution. This change signals that Olly’s influence helps her gain a sense of bodily instinct and knowledge.

“We gather each other up. We are lips and arms and legs and bodies entangled. He raises himself above me and we are wordless, and then we are joined and moving silently. We are joined and I know all of the secrets of the universe.” 

As Madeline and Olly have sex for the first time, she is struck by the physicality of their lovemaking, hence the list of body parts (“lips and arms and legs”). This signals that Madeline has learned to experience things on a physical level and communicate with her body rather than just with her mind. In a sense, she was “disembodied” earlier in the story because her body was a barrier to her expression. Now she is “bodied” and uses her body to express and intensify her feelings for Olly. The lack of verbal communication here is a departure from Madeline’s reliance on words earlier in the book.

“I have to let Olly go. I’ve learned my lesson. Love can kill you and I’d rather be alive than out there living.”

This passage comes during Madeline’s period of despair after her return from Hawaii, when she comes to believe that the grief of not being with Olly is better than having him in her life and risking him abandoning her when she has to return to confinement. She views her sickness during the trip as confirmation that she can’t be outside and decides to proactively end the relationship before she is devastated by Olly breaking up with her. Her acknowledgment that being cooped up inside is different than being “out there living,” however, shows that she’s learned to distinguish between being physically alive and emotionally alive.

“This mistake is upsetting her more than it did me.

‘Mom, it’s OK,’ I say. ‘I didn’t really believe it anyway.’

I don’t think she hears me. ‘I had to protect you,’ she says.

‘I know, Mom.’ I don’t really want to talk about this anymore. I move back into her arms.

‘I had to protect you,’ she says into my hair.

And it’s that last ‘I had to protect you’ that makes a part of me go quiet.

There’s an uncertainty to her voice that I don’t expect and can’t account for.” 

This exchange between Madeline and Pauline takes place at a critical moment of the book. Madeline has just found out that she might not be sick and at first believes Pauline’s insistence that the other doctor is mistaken. However, the exchange suggests to Madeline that Pauline may have deluded herself into thinking that Madeline had SCID and that her entire life has been based on a falsehood.

“Her pain is endless. It falls off the ends of the world. Her pain is a dead sea. Her pain is for me, but I cannot bear it anymore.” 

The metaphors used here carry extra layers of meaning because of Madeline’s experiences. The “ends of the world” image hearkens back to her visualizations of outer space. The “dead sea” image reveals that Madeline has finally realized that Pauline’s pain over losing her husband and son has kept her paralyzed in a state of overprotection and fear. The real ocean in Hawaii, however, was dynamic and vibrant, not “dead,” and Madeline recognizes that her mother’s pain holds both of them back.