No One Tells Everything

"What's the worst thing you've ever done?" asks Grace, the heroine of NO ONE TELLS EVERYTHING, late in the novel. "What if that one thing, that one moment of darkness or selfishness was your definer?" For Grace, that's exactly what has happened to her life. By day, this attractive woman in her early 30s is stuck in a dead-end copyediting job at a sensational weekly news magazine. By night, she drinks alone at a neighborhood bar whose bartender is her only friend. Drink, and the casual sex that often accompanies it, helps her blot out her past. Unable to forge real relationships or forget her childhood disappointments, Grace is stuck. That is, until she hears about the brutal murder of an attractive, popular Long Island female college student, supposedly by a male classmate whose advances she rejected. Grace feels a strange connection to Charles Raggatt, the awkward, unpopular young man accused of the crime, even before she learns that Charles grew up in a posh Cleveland suburb right next to the one where Grace herself was raised. Suddenly, as she delves into Charles's history, interviewing his acquaintances from high school and college, she has a project, one that takes her away from her stifling job and her pathetic personal life --- but that also takes her back to a place in her own life she had hoped was buried forever. Grace must come to terms with her own past even more when a family emergency calls her back to Cleveland. There she's forced to recall the accidental death of her sister Callie when both were just children. Ever since, Grace has faced guilt for destroying her seemingly perfect family, as well as the perception that the wrong daughter --- beautiful, sunny, loveable Callie rather than awkward, lonely, difficult Grace --- died that day. As Grace uses her time in Ohio to dig deeper into Charles's story, she also tears the polished but fragile veneer off her own family story, realizing that below the "perfect" suburban existence lurks some dark secrets --- including one that Grace herself has been hiding for decades. NO ONE TELLS EVERYTHING, Rae Meadows's second work of fiction, is, on the surface, a murder mystery with a most unusual investigator. Along the way, however, the mystery plot becomes secondary to the difficult, painful stories of personal discovery that form the real crux of the novel. As Grace learns more of Charles's childhood and adolescence (stories that are conveyed to the reader as flashbacks from Charles's point of view), she also is drawn, kicking and screaming (and drinking), into her own painful family and personal history. Although the mystery tale will (at least for whodunit fans) be less than suspenseful or satisfactory, Grace's own story manages to be both. A compelling, damaged heroine who might still have a chance for healing, Grace demonstrates that in researching another damaged soul's story, she has a chance to find --- and save --- herself. --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

A vulnerable and emotionally brittle girl, Grace lives a hard-edged life in Manhattan, working as a copy editor for a weekly news magazine, while sinking back glasses of Chardonnay at her local watering hole, the barman Jimmy her only real friend and her ever-willing co-conspirator. Quiet and taciturn, Grace keeps to herself not really cultivating any one in particular while the scenery of her diverse neighborhood constantly shifts and changes around her. She's decidedly ambivalent towards the kindly advances of her cool boss Brian with his endearing fashion mishaps and his shaggy bangs because lately, Grace has been too busy focusing on the constant news reports of Sarah Shafer, a honey-hared freshman, recently vanished from the quiet campus of a small college two hours from the city. More intrigued by the now unrealized possibilities of Sarah than her own, Grace seems emotionally shutdown refusing to attend to her own fractured and careless existence. With these television images of Sarah constantly filtering in and asserting themselves into Grace's consciousness, she becomes a girl looking at the world through a type of fragile glass, searching for a wedge of hope perhaps that is lodged like a splinter refusing to surface deep within her psyche. The pictures of Sarah take Grace on a search to make sense of her untidy life, the death of her younger sister Callie when Grace was only 10 weighing all too heavily on her shoulders and providing much of her guilt and her unwillingness to take care of business. When the search for Sarah's killer reveals a suspect and an accompanying explanation - "a cocky rich kid, a pretty girl, a sexual advance gone bad" - Grace becomes ever more intrigued, and then later obsessed by this damaged boy, his own isolated circumstances effectively unlocking all of Grace's demons. The boy, Charles Raggatt had lived in the complex where Sarah's body was found, and was reportedly spoiled by his self-indulgent parents who had allowed him to move off campus to the beach during his first year because their money had made the school bend the rules. Trying to find answers, Grace begins to investigate Sarah's death and the circumstances leading to up to Charles' friendship with her, eventually striking up a hesitant friendship with Charles. Ultimately it is friendship that seems based on mutual need as the letters and then phone-calls begin to dredge up Grace's fractured childhood memories of Callie's demise and the afternoon when old Mr. Jablonski's wood-sided Aspen veered around the curve, and when her sisters body bounced up onto the car's hood like a rag doll, coming to rest in the cradle of a crushed windshield. As the ramifications of her part in Callie's accident begin to sink in, Grace falls even further into her self-destructive behavior. Blind, deaf and mute, she falls into the darkness, desperately trying to immolate herself with drink and tawdry one night stands, forcing her mind blank, pushing away all of

This is such a unique, darkly compelling yet beautiful story. It goes to all the terrifying, lonely, alienated places we all fear and avoid with all of our might. A woman with a seemingly 'normal' life - a good job, a nice family - is captivated by a young man accused of murder. She is obviously on the edge - she drinks too much, doesn't have any friends, engages in promiscuous and dangerous sex. But on the surface has nothing in common with an accused murderer. Yet, she begins a relationship with him via letters and phone calls while he awaits his trial from prison. Why is she so drawn to him? What in this monster, could she possibly relate to? Her compulsion to understand him is slowly revealed, painting a terrible and honest portrait of the self-loathing and boundless loneliness that sometimes is what resides at the heart of what it means to be human. If you appreciate the beauty in sad stories, you'll love this book.