Every You, Every Me by David Levithan

In this high school-set psychological tale, a tormented teen named Evan starts to discover a series of unnerving photographs—some of which feature him. Someone is stalking him . . . messing with him . . . threatening him. Worse, ever since his best friend Ariel has been gone, he's been unable to sleep, spending night after night torturing himself for his role in her absence. And as crazy as it sounds, Evan's starting to believe it's Ariel that's behind all of this, punishing him. But the more Evan starts to unravel the mystery, the more his paranoia and insomnia amplify, and the more he starts to unravel himself. Creatively told with black-and-white photos interspersed between the text so the reader can see the photos that are so unnerving to Evan, Every You, Every Me is a one-of-a-kind departure from a one-of-a-kind author.

Why I Picked It Up

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Every You, Every Me is a book I think about a lot, not just for its actual literal writing (and creative formatting) or the fact that it's written by one of my favorite thinkers in book publishing, David Levithan. "Departure" is an excellent way to put it in the blurb above.

He has a precision that pierces the veil, so to speak, for me and makes me feel like he's articulated thoughts I didn't previously have words for. This is a slim volume, a backlist title, something you wouldn't dig for. But his existentialism threads through his broader, more commercial works too—like Dash & Lily's Book of Dares, which I love and often reread during the holiday season.

That quality is compressed here, evoking a certain melancholy that might remind you of the Tumblr era (complimentary. I love anyone who can do a specific vibe.) Admittedly, it's been a few years since I've read it, and I'm not sure I'll ever go back to reread it—but it does capture the concept of this very succinctly. Definitely not for everyone, but always worth the conversation.

I'm more so using this as a jumping-off point, so excuse the abstraction.

Why I Think About the Different Selves

A theme of my manuscript and my own life and my own reading threads tends to be this rumination over compartmentalization, individualism, and how much we're affected by the context of others. In my own book, my main character has this concept of seasonal selves and a significant split. So which is really "her"?

Unconscious influences, reflexive habits (like me running faster on the path where I know people I know are probably driving by), how I'm a different person alone versus with my identical twin.

I got a lot of peace from this concept introduced in How to Be Multiple (as well as the many, many books on attachment and enmeshment and relationships I've sorted through in the last year or so) that we have both an individual and collective identity. There's who we are alone, which is one layer, and there's who we are around others, which is another—and they're both accurate.

I've brought this up before to others re: who we are on the Internet versus who we are offline (as much of my own online presence is curated when I'm in the specific mood to write or post.) And then who I am in my journals, maybe, versus who I am all the time, because I journal in a specific mood too. And then we get into all this conversation about when you feel that people "know" you at all versus the idea of you, and when you can ever decide that you feel actually known.

Identity can as much collective as it is individual—which is terrifying and layered and confusing at times too. But it's endlessly multiplying because of the different combinations of people who bring out different traits or sides of you. So how can you ever decide the main one? Is it who you are when you're alone?

Of course, then you veer into essentialism or the Ship of Theseus experiment and what is permanent versus temporary. Flowers for Algernon does a gorgeous job tackling this: are you your most recent self or the combination? Are you allowed to pick and choose your favorite things? What about when there is a gap between who you are and what the vision of yourself is? Aren't we all just trying to get those two selves align? What is the point at which you are delusional?

The Role of Time

In the fall, I had a conversation with someone about temporary people who pass through your life (see: my Tiger Lily review) and it got me thinking about this. Even You're Not Listening points out that we listen less well to people we know (or rather assume we know) but that people are constantly re-introducing themselves, so the hard part of living is to stay perpetually open to always newly getting to know others.

one of my favorite book lines from my own

Often, my first instinct when I know I'll probably never see someone again—either from grief or other reasons—is to think: oh, you know. They didn't see that side of me]. They don't know this version of me.

It can be very sad too. When someone is gone, you don't really know them, especially if time is warping them into a different version of the self. But that also can give you hope about encountering them again? What are you allowed to miss? What are you allowed to believe in about anyone? Psychologically, even, our traits and even our personalities are much less static than we assume. (Cue decisions about whether or not who you are is what you do too.)

I think about the hero's journey specifically. The archetype being that someone has to go through individual trials and suffering to be forged, but the contrast of coming home again (different) is where they make meaning. And you can go the McCarthy route in that you have to run forever to avoid it, or you can go the mythological route of expecting there to be an endpoint.

And at a certain point, you can get so bogged down in the complexity of all this, so you just have to decide to believe someone you know is the same person to you, or that your assumptions about them are right. Which like: ???

Realistically, you want people to get the best of you, but they'll probably get the average instead. And maybe the only form of generosity, the only form of real knowing, is giving someone the time to occupy multiple spheres in front of you, to change. In my book and in reality, I wrestle a lot with the guilt of someone leaving before they see the 'right' version of you.

In my revision summary, in which I talked about going through a staggering eight drafts of Mountain Soundssince 2017, I talk about all the different versions and lenses that I had to sit with over the course of it. And each version of myself brought something different to the work, which is partly why static objects like books, media, etc,. can be more reliable than people, who can change, so you can bounce off your thoughts and reflections and always get something new because you have the contrast to compare it to. You can sort of pull out what about yourself is the same or different when encountering it. People though, are much less reliable.

Anyway, the Book

Every You, Every Me is short. It's a little heavy and fragmented. I get the same weightiness from it in which I need to go for a very sunny walk to clear my head afterwards—the same sadness as when I read Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami or This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz.

Some books always signal that you can never quite not be alone with your own thoughts. That if you recognize the complexity in getting to know someone at all, and trusting them to know you and stick around through it, it's impossible to believe that process is actually solid. The answer is to think less about it, avoid the process entirely in favor of stark independence, or believe in the other side of simplicity. It's a tough place to be, honestly, because a lot of you wants to look away from the every you, every me awareness at all.

The moody, angsty vibe is partly I Wrote This for You by Iain S. Thomas. Some of the photos might remind you of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. The strikethroughs of Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi (which is funny in combination, because Riggs and Mafi are married to each other.

While writing this review, the mystery and eeriness of trying to find his lost friend reminds me of the recent The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert, which makes sense considering the aspect I love most about both of their writing styles is this precision of language. Some of the language might remind you of On Love by Alain de Botton. Analytical enough on some niche, universal aspect of the human experience that people don't try to examine. Because self-consciousness causes its own problems.

For fans of:

I Wrote This for You by Iain S. Thomas; The Wicker King by K. Ancrum; Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi; On Love by Alain de Botton; Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami; This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz; Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes; Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger; Looking for Alaska by John Green; etc,.