The repressed bitterness, anger and disappointment simmering for years inside the Lee family finally erupt in Everything I Never Told You after daughter Lydia, her parents’ favorite, disappears on May 3, 1977. It is a fine spring day in northern Ohio, where the family lives in Middlewood, a town an hour outside Toledo.

James and Marilyn Lee first look for their daughter among her friends, but they discover that Lydia has been maintaining an elaborate charade for their benefit, even conducting long phone conversations with no one on the other end. She has no friends. Two days later, an empty rowboat on the nearby lake leads police to Lydia’s drowned body. Her puzzled parents believed she hated the water and would never take a boat out on it.

Years before, Marilyn attended Radcliffe where she had to fight stereotypes to enroll in pre-med classes. Her almost all-male teachers and classmates…