55 pages • 1 hour read
Megan LallyThat's Not My Name
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Memory’s Role in Identity
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to murder, violence, kidnapping, child abuse, and police harassment.
That’s Not My Name uses Madison’s characterization and plotline to demonstrate that memories are central to a person’s sense of self. While all of the chapters told from Drew’s first-person perspective are titled “Drew,” the chapters told from Madison’s first-person perspective are not all titled “Madison.” At first, they are titled “Girl,” and later they are titled “Mary.” Only Chapter 29, Madison’s final chapter, bears her real name. This reflects the role that memory plays in forming her sense of herself: Immediately after she wakes in the ditch, her amnesia means she knows herself only as a “girl,” with no name, no past, no clear identity. Then Wayne tells her that her name is Mary, and she begins struggling to construct an identity around this name. It is only after her memories return that she is confident enough to reject the “Mary Boone” identity and think of herself accurately, as “Madison.”
On her first night at the cabin, she cries herself to sleep, trying to reconcile herself to her supposed identity as Mary Boone. She feels “exposed without [her] memories, unsafe in a world where she cannot even “own [her] name or [her] face” (55). Because she has no memories to form a strong foundation for her identity, she is vulnerable to Wayne’s manipulations. She instinctively feels that she is not the kind of person Wayne assures her she is: a conservative homebody who enjoys stereotypically feminine clothing and sitting quietly indoors watching television. On the contrary, she is drawn to the outdoors, exploration and socializing, and an entirely different style of clothing. Still, she does not feel sure enough of herself to challenge his assertions; she vacillates between suspicion and self-doubt for several days, despite strong evidence that Wayne is not really her father. Her insecurity about who she is and what she really knows leads her to talk herself out of the correct interpretation of this evidence over and over—when Wayne “forgets” that she has a life-threatening allergy and then misidentifies the trigger, for instance, she sees how suspicious this is, but she pushes her suspicions away, coming up with thin rationalizations for Wayne’s behavior that allow her to cling to the “Mary Boone” identity. Given how frightening it is for her to navigate a world empty of memories, it is easy to understand how the false identity Wayne constructs for her becomes a security blanket she is reluctant to give up.
It is only when Madison begins to recover her memories that she regains her confidence and can confront the likelihood that she is being lied to and manipulated. Her memories of her mother’s words and actions remind her that she is loved and function like a mirror, reflecting her own identity back to her. She begins to remember other things about herself—that she is a softball player and a high school senior at a public school, for instance. As these recovered memories begin allowing her to assemble a more authentic sense of her own identity, Madison finds it easier to entertain her suspicions about Wayne and act accordingly. When her impromptu investigation of the hole the coyote has dug leads to her discovery of Ben Hooper’s body and Wayne’s ominous comment that she has ruined everything, she is able to act quickly and decisively to protect herself in a way that has been out of her reach for most of the narrative.
The Deceptive Nature of Appearances
When it comes to being genuinely understood by others, Drew and Wayne have opposite experiences. Drew is a good person who, because of circumstances, is being treated like a dangerous criminal. Wayne actually is a dangerous criminal, but he is able to manipulate others into believing he is a genuinely good person. Their contrasting experiences demonstrate that it is easy to be misled about a person’s true nature by circumstantial evidence.
Because Drew was the last person known to be with Lola on the night she disappeared and because, when a woman comes to harm, it is often an intimate partner who is responsible, nearly everyone in Washington City believes that Drew is responsible for Lola’s disappearance. He inadvertently adds to the circumstantial case against himself by continuing to show up at places associated with Lola and her disappearance—her home, the boat launch, and so on. People stare at him and whisper as he passes, his teacher tells him that he should confess, and the sheriff brings him in repeatedly for questioning and openly accuses him of harming Lola. Megan Lally herself creates some ambiguity around Drew’s potential involvement early in the novel by having him repeatedly mention his feelings of guilt and responsibility, making it possible for the reader to also misjudge Drew based on relatively thin evidence. Any ambiguity is cleared up by Chapter 11, when Drew explicitly explains to Autumn that he feels guilty because he broke up with Lola, not because he harmed her. Lally also characterizes Drew in ways that argue against his guilt: He is clearly a moral person who worries about upsetting others and is desperate to do whatever he can to find Lola. The characters who know him best—his fathers and Max—never entertain the idea of his guilt for a moment. The rush to judge Drew by everyone else in the community demonstrates how easy it is to be misled by circumstances into misunderstanding a person’s fundamental nature.
On the other hand, Wayne deliberately manipulates others into believing he is a much better person than he really is. Wayne Boone is a misogynist and a serial killer who has actually murdered his own child. Everyone around him misreads his character, however, and he goes undetected for years. He affects an affable, good-guy persona, as when he chats pleasantly with Eloise and gives Ben Hooper friendly, neighborly assurances of mutual aid—shortly before he kills the man. He convinces both Bowman and Madison that he is a loving and concerned father who is eager to protect and comfort his supposed daughter, “Mary.” It takes Madison days to see through his facade, and when she does it is almost too late.
This theme is further developed by the construction of the novel itself: Based on physical appearance alone, Wayne misleads Madison and Bowman into believing Madison is Mary Boone, and Lally misleads the reader into believing Madison might be Lola Scott. By the end of the novel, the reader has seen the many false appearances stripped away, and Madison’s, Wayne’s, and Drew’s true identities are laid bare.
The Dangers of Isolation
Throughout the novel, isolation is portrayed as a dangerous state. Drew and Madison are the novel’s most obviously isolated characters, and each is placed in peril because of this isolation.
Madison is isolated by her amnesia and her situation with Wayne Boone. Wayne deliberately cuts her off from social interactions, and lacking any outside perspectives, she is easy prey for his manipulations. Instead of seeing through his pretense of being her loving father and removing herself from the situation when she is in Waybrooke, she continues to believe in Wayne and returns to Alton with him willingly. Drew is isolated by his community’s suspicions and by his own desire to hide his feelings of guilt over the breakup with Lola. At the beginning of the novel he cannot connect with anyone other than his fathers and Max, and he withdraws from even these loyal supporters because he cannot be honest about what he is thinking and feeling. As a result, he makes bad decisions that place him in danger from the police and increase suspicions around him. Worse, he is ineffectual in his quest to find out what happened to Lola. It is only when he bridges the gap between himself and others by honestly sharing what he has been feeling—and why—that he can turn to Max and Autumn for help. After he joins forces with Max and Autumn, he is able to make more effective decisions and make progress in his efforts to find his missing girlfriend.
The novel also employs remote settings to reinforce its claims about the costs of isolation. Wayne Boone stalks his victims and strikes when they are alone. He holds them in a remote fishing cabin where it is nearly impossible for them to seek outside help. It is also the isolation of the cabin that allows him to get away with his impulsive murder of Ben Hooper. The small-town police force in Washington City is isolated from surrounding communities and therefore not under the kind of outside scrutiny that might discourage the lazy policing choices that endanger Drew and missing people like Lola. Alton is an even smaller town, with a police station that is only open for part of each day. When Madison steps outside the station on the night after she is first found, she thinks that “The town looks dead to the world” (46) and, in the darkness under burned-out streetlights, all she can see along the road is a gas station and “a deserted motel” (46). It is portrayed as the kind of isolated place where a vulnerable young woman like Madison can easily slip between the cracks, and this is exactly what happens to her there.
