We Were Never Here

Emily is the novel’s protagonist and narrator. In the opening chapters, she narrates concerns about her boringness and conventionality, especially in comparison to her vivacious, free-spirited, independent best friend. While Kristen moves across the world for a job opportunity and is perfectly happy without a romantic relationship, Emily is content to stay in Milwaukee and longs to find a life partner and become a mother. While she may think her normalcy makes her boring, that very quality allows readers to imaginatively inhabit her position and consider how they would handle her dilemma.

Emily’s childhood and young adult experiences created the prime conditions for a possessive manipulator like Kristen to gain a foothold in her life. Her father was cold and uncaring, sometimes using corporal punishment simply because he found her annoying. Her mother was distant and neglectful, taking no actions to protect Emily from her father. Her first college boyfriend, Ben, had anger issues that eventually escalated to his harming her. Moreover, Kristen and Emily met and bonded in a college economics class where they were the only two women. Given these past experiences, it is not surprising that Emily is slow to perceive that a fellow woman is going to violent lengths to control her, and quick to accept that woman’s claims of allyship against dangerous men.

As the novel progresses, Emily becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator as Kristen describes a version of the past that differs from Emily’s memory. As Kristen makes Emily question her own memory of Sebastian’s death, it emerges that Emily may not be an accurate mouthpiece for her own story. In addition to Emily’s uncertainty surrounding key facts, she also tends to evade responsibility for her role in the Sebastian and Paolo incidents. While the novel ultimately suggests she probably had no role in killing either man (although the reader never gets a certain answer about Sebastian’s death), she willingly participates in covering up their deaths. Her very normalcy and conventionality, though, make her unwilling to think of herself as capable of crime. As a result, the more she learns about Kristen’s dangerousness, the more willing she is to assign all blame to Kristen and see herself simply as Kristen’s victim.

The climax of the novel forces Emily to reckon with her similarities to Kristen, primarily her own dangerous anger, and she allows herself one cathartic moment when she pushes Kristen off the cliff. This moment is the culmination not just of her anger with Kristen, but with all the people, mostly men, who have coerced and intimidated her throughout her life. She seems to ultimately reject that vengeful part of herself, but the novel’s final lines leave open the possibility that she will revisit those impulses in the future.