42 pages • 1 hour read
Andrea BartzWe Were Never Here
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 1-2 Summary
The novel opens with best friends Kristen Czarnecki and Emily Donovan enjoying the end of their trip to Chile. The pair travel together annually, and recently these trips have become even more meaningful as Kristen’s work has taken her to Australia while Emily has settled down in Milwaukee. Kristen and Emily met over a decade before the narrative, as college freshmen. Emily, the novel’s narrator, confesses that she needs this trip; she has been in a deep depression for the last year while Kristen has been in Australia.
As the pair enjoys a drink at a vineyard not far from their hotel, Emily contemplates telling Kristen about a man she recently began dating, but she ultimately keeps the news to herself. Emily fears that in comparison to Kristen’s free, independent personality, her own desire for a regular, stable romantic relationship will look dully conventional.
Back at the hotel, Emily recalls the early years of her friendship with Kristen. They bonded when they realized they were the only two women in their economics class. Emily credits Kristen with helping her realize how bad her relationship with her then-boyfriend, Ben, really was. He controlled and manipulated Emily, and after one of their arguments led to Ben’s physical abusiveness, she fled to Kristen’s house. Kristen went to Emily and Ben’s shared apartment the next day to collect all Emily’s belongings, ensuring she never had to see Ben again.
While Emily already likes Aaron a great deal, she has had difficulty with physical intimacy beyond kissing, and she hints that this is because of some past trauma she experienced on the friends’ trip to Cambodia one year ago.
Chapter 3 Summary
In Chapter 3, Emily narrates the disaster of the Cambodia trip:
Emily and Kristen met a South African backpacker, Sebastian, at a bar, and they playfully gave him aliases as their names: Nicole and Joan. Kristen made excuses to stay at the bar so Emily could take Sebastian back to their hotel room.
In the hotel room, Sebastian quickly grew rougher than Emily was comfortable with, and she told him to stop. He ignored her and began to physically overpower her, pinning her against the wall and hitting her head against it. Had Kristen not walked in at that moment, he would have raped her. Kristen hit him over the head with a lamp; on his way to the ground, he hit his head on the bed frame and began bleeding. Kristen then kicked him over and over until the two realized he was dead.
Emily and Kristen considered calling the police and explaining that they acted in self-defense, but they realized the police might not believe them. The story of Amanda Knox—who spent four years in an Italian prison after being charged and eventually acquitted of murdering her roommate—hung over them like an omen. Therefore, they decided the best course of action was to secretly dispose of the body. They snuck the body out of the hotel, drove it to a cliff, loaded it down with rocks, and pushed it over the edge into a river below.
When they each arrived back at their respective homes, Emily was crushed under the trauma of the sexual assault and the fear of authorities discovering the friends’ cover-up. Her work and personal life suffered, with only Kristen’s nightly phone calls holding her together. Only recently before the Chile trip had Emily begun to get close to feeling like her former self.
Chapters 4-5 Summary
Over dinner in Chile, Kristen proposes that Emily join her for a six-month multi-country backpacking tour. Emily, stunned, politely declines, explaining that she enjoys her life in Milwaukee. She also confesses her fledgling relationship with Aaron, citing it as another reason she wouldn’t want to leave.
Kristen confesses her disappointment but presses Emily for more details about Aaron. At a bar that evening, Kristen strikes up a conversation with a good-looking stranger, Paolo, and gives him the fake names the women used in Cambodia, Nicole and Joan. Emily is annoyed and shocked that Kristen would so casually revive their names from the night of Sebastian’s death and that she would even entertain the idea of a fling with a stranger on an international vacation after Sebastian. She tries to tell herself she is being paranoid and unreasonable, however, and reacts nonchalantly when Kristen and Paolo head back to the hotel.
After killing a couple hours at the bar, Emily returns to the hotel. When she enters the room, she sees Kristen on the floor, crying and covered in blood. Behind her, Paolo lies dead, slumped on the floor with his head crushed in. Kristen sobs that he attacked her.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Emily’s first-person narration is essential to the novel’s tone. If the reader were instead introduced to the story through Kristen’s voice or through an omniscient third-person narrator, the novel could not build suspense around Kristen’s personality and motivations. With Emily’s narration, the reader meets Kristen first as a consummate best friend, a person of boundless generosity who sees more in Emily than Emily sees in herself. She provides stability and solace through the most traumatic period of Emily’s life. Beginning with this initial impression of Kristen allows the reader to accompany Emily on her journey and to understand her occasional slowness to question Kristen’s behavior or motives.
Bartz reveals Kristen’s true motivations gradually, but several early warning signs appear in the first few chapters. For instance, the six-month backpacking trip Kristen proposes to Emily is not an unheard of idea for well-to-do adventurous people, but it does seem curious that she would suggest it so soon after moving to a new country and starting a new job. Also, Kristen’s use of the pseudonyms Nicole and Joan in Emily’s presence reveals that, on some level, she is not as sensitive to Emily’s trauma as she wants to appear; even if charitably interpreted as a thoughtless slip of the tongue, Kristen’s reminding Emily of her sexual assault and subsequent criminal activity is inexcusably careless. Interpreted in a less generous light, it is a sadistically purposeful reminder meant to put Emily on edge.
Because of these early warning signs, the reader must question Kristen’s story about Paolo from the moment Emily walks into the hotel room. The story is immediately suspicious simply because it seems like such horrible luck for the same sexual assault and subsequent fatal self-defense to afflict two best friends within a year. However, at the same time, just as Emily and Kristen explicitly state, young women traveling alone are at great risk of violence and sexual assault, particularly when alone with an unknown man. Bartz uses this well known risk to maintain suspense, tangle the reader’s suspicions, and further introduce the central theme of misplaced guilt. This plotline plays with the limits of the reader’s sympathy, as the reader may confront an unconscious tendency to normalize sexist violence, asking themselves if their sympathy for a sexual assault survivor diminishes if that person did not take every possible measure to protect themselves in a situation that they knew from previous experience to be highly dangerous. Through to its final pages, the novel continuously leads readers to scrutinize their allotments of culpability and to examine their reactions to women’s choices around their own safety.
