42 pages • 1 hour read
We Were Never Here
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Themes
Misplaced Guilt and Shame
Throughout the entire novel, Emily wrestles to understand how much guilt she and Kristen bear for their own assaults. Like many contemporary women, she has absorbed the idea that perpetrators of assaults should be held accountable for their actions, not the victims of those assaults; but familiarity with this idea and emotional acceptance of it are two different things. She knows that she disregarded safety tips so frequently given to female travelers, so she struggles with self-blame. Because she did not take safety precautions she knew to be helpful, she wonders how she could not be responsible for the assault.
This theme is reflected in an incident Emily remembers from her childhood, in which her father punished her. She was singing a song over and over when suddenly her father scooped her off the stairs and spanked her. The incident stays with her into adulthood because of her visceral memory of not understanding what she had done wrong. As an adult, she realizes her only sin was annoying her father, but knowing she did not actually misbehave does not dispel her guilty feeling; she is still filled with “steamy shame” (124) when she recalls the incident during a therapy session. Similarly involuntary are her feelings of shame over her sexual assault, a physical and emotional response align with neither her values nor what she would say to anyone in a similar position.
Bartz structures the narrative itself to engage the question of women’s responsibility for their own safety when Emily finds Paolo dead in the Chile hotel room. While this scene with Kristen might elicit a reader’s pity, Bartz poses the implicit question of Kristen’s responsibility for her fate when she knowingly repeated the exact sequence of events that led to her best friend’s assault one year earlier. After Chile, Emily fears that she and Kristen attract danger like a magnet, that there is an inevitability to their violation. She even fears that going upstate to the lake house will tempt their old pattern to rear its head. In the novel’s climax, Emily experiments with reversing her feelings of culpability by becoming violent herself, pushing her friend off a cliff. However, she ultimately realizes that this will not help her live with her past decisions. There is no such quick fix for absolving her feelings of guilt, but with her supportive therapist and boyfriend, Emily may yet stand a chance of overcoming her shame.
The Unreliability of Memory
Unreliable narrators come in many forms; some deliberately mislead the reader while others are themselves confused, misled, or unwell. Emily is an unreliable narrator because of her susceptibility to Kristen’s manipulation, which leaves her unable to trust her own memory. This theme materializes most obviously when Kristen temporarily convinces Emily that she, and not Kristen, was the one who kicked Sebastian to death. When Kristen suggests this repeatedly and forcefully enough, Emily visualizes it in her mind alongside her former memory of Kristen delivering the blows. The new memory feels as vivid as the original one.
Emily finds her memories unreliable in other ways as well. On the way to Nana and Bill’s lake house for her birthday, she revisits a text conversation with her former boyfriend Colin. She broke up with Colin on Kristen’s insistence, and the break-up text was practically dictated word for word by Kristen. Ever since, she has remembered Colin as a possessive and controlling partner and her own actions in ending the relationship as mature and necessary. When she reviews the texts with the benefit of hindsight, however, she sees that Colin was behaving normally, asking for basic forms of respect, like clear communication. It was she, not Colin, who overreacted and refused to work out a compromise.
By the end of the novel, Emily realizes that the stories people tell themselves about their lives can influence memory as much as memory can influence these personal narratives. She wanted to believe that Colin, like Ben, was an arrogant, abusive partner so that her own behavior was rational and necessary, so she contorted her memories to fit that narrative. Therefore, when Kristen tells her she was the one who killed Sebastian, Emily fears she has done the same thing—contorted her memories to fit the narrative that she is a kind, nonviolent person. As soon as she starts questioning her own reliability, the reader too must question it.
After Kristen’s death, Emily regains a sense of ownership over her memories and past. However, it is an open question what story she will tell herself about the past as she moves forward. She seems eager to move on with the assurance that Kristen was the evil mastermind behind every adversity in Cambodia and Chile and to downplay her own personal decisions. She may have broken free of her chief gaslighter, but she may or may not go on to form an accurate sense of self.
The Shifting Nature of Friendship
While Emily and Kristen’s story goes far beyond the boundaries of an average friendship, one aspect of the friendship is extremely common: the fact that it changes shape as the women age. Bartz deliberately times the narrative as Emily turns 30, placing Emily and Kristen’s crisis at a moment when many people take stock of their relationships as they shift into a new decade. Healthy friendships can grow and change as the friends themselves do. While friends must put effort into maintaining bonds through events like career shifts, romantic decisions, and childbirths, that maintenance is possible.
Kristen, however, is unwilling to let her friendship grow and change. She feels the need to freeze the friendship at the moment that Emily was most dependent on her: post-Cambodia. So intent is she on keeping Emily’s dependence that she is willing to kill an innocent stranger; she would rather subject Emily to acute trauma than allow the friendship to grow. Kristen’s troubled background helps explain her drastic need. Within the space of a month at the age of 12, she lost her father, mother, and best friend. This may not excuse her violence and manipulation, but it explains her hatred of change and her desire to hold her chosen family tight. When she changes tactics from chirpy persuasion to outright blackmail, Kristen exposes her willingness to destroy any goodwill the friendship originally had in order to maintain some shadow of the old emotional intimacy.
Emily, meanwhile, begins to want space, but she hesitates to acknowledge this feeling. In her therapy sessions with Adrienne, she often expresses feelings of obligation to Kristen; she thinks of Kristen as the one in the friendship who is better at being a rock in times of crisis. Obligation is not the same as affection, however, and by the time Kristen shows up in Milwaukee, Emily has no sincere desire to spend time with her. She is beginning to change from a position of dependence to independence and self-sufficiency. When Kristen dies, Emily is finally free to pursue this trajectory in earnest. Even if Kristen had not died, though, the two women’s friendship was long gone, strangled by Kristen’s unwillingness to let it change.
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