To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Fiction | Novel | YA

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Themes

Lying Necessitates More Lies

Lara Jean believes that the one thing she is better at than Margot is lying, which proves to be untrue later in the novel. Lara Jean lies easily and impulsively. Even if Lara Jean is good at lying, it’s very stressful to make sure the stories she tells match up. Lara Jean’s first lie is a lie of omission. She never mentions that she’s in love with her neighbor, Josh, and even keeps her feelings to herself when her sister begins dating him. Even after Margot and Josh break up, Josh never knows about Lara Jean’s feelings until Kitty leaks her letters. Josh’s reaction suggests that the pair might’ve had a chance for a relationship had Lara Jean been honest in the first place.

Lara Jean’s next lie is more outright. In trying to avoid talking to Josh about her feelings and contain her first lie, she perpetuates another lie by kissing Peter in the hallway and declaring he’s her boyfriend. She later lies again to Josh, saying they broke up, and then must lie to say they’re back together when Peter tells Josh their relationship is going well. While the pair originally envision that their lies will stay at school, they prove harder to contain. When their families find out that they’re in a relationship, Lara Jean and Peter lie even more to the people they love the most. Peter and Lara Jean are good at continuing this huge lie because they actually do get along very well, so both of them easily forget that they’re pretending in the first place.

The theme of lying takes on new dimensions as Lara Jean gets more lost in her own lies. At a certain point, Lara Jean admits that she’s lost the ability to understand what the truth is. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a warning about lying and concealing your feelings. Even the secondary characters keep secrets of their own, such as Margot’s secret that she’s broken her virginity pact, and Kitty’s secret mailing of Lara Jean’s letters, propelling a complicated plot in which people who love one another succumb to misunderstanding.

Fantasy Romances Versus Reality

Lara Jean is very relatable in part because she tends to fantasize about her life. It’s hard to understand what exactly being in love means and what it looks like, so Lara Jean forms her own narrative about love in the books that she reads and the letters that she writes but doesn’t intend to send. These fantasies are a tactic Lara Jean has developed to combat a complicated and cruel world. She lost her mother at an early age and therefore doesn’t have a role model to help her understand how to become a woman. Lara Jean and her sisters must fill those holes in on their own, but without real-world experience, Lara Jean falls into fantasy.

Lara Jean is reserved, she doesn’t have a lot of friends, which keeps her even more tied to her internal life. When Lara Jean teams up with Peter to fake a relationship, Lara Jean finally experiences a high school social life, which begins to chip away at her fantasies. But the fantasies are comforting, so Lara Jean often rejects real-world experiences in favor of the fantasies. Lara Jean can control her fantasy, whereas she often feels terrifyingly out of control in the real world. Lara Jean’s fantasies are closely tied to her ability to lie, and soon she realizes that she loses control even of her fantasies because her real life continues to fall short of her dreams. Peter helps her to confront the fact that real love is messier than her romance novels would have her believe. There is space for both healthy fantasy and an embrace of the real world, which is a lesson Lara Jean must learn in order to get the love story she wants.

Positive Change and Coming-of-Age

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is relatable because there are so many changes that begin in high school, especially in someone’s junior year. All of a sudden, young people are expected to start making huge decisions about their futures, so their responsibilities shift. Adolescence is a complicated time of change because each year teenagers grow physically and mentally. It’s hard to imagine what exactly one wants from their lives when they’re 16 years old, especially because the social pressures of school feel much more immediate. Han explores this issue throughout the novel because Lara Jean is desperate to maintain a structure that served her well in the past. Change can be difficult because it poses an uncertain future, but Lara Jean learns that change can also be good. Her relationship with Josh is an excellent example of this. Josh and Lara Jean will not be able to maintain the friendship they had as children, before Josh and Margot started dating, and they shouldn’t.

Margot’s journey emphasizes the idea that change is scary but good. Margot tackles an enormous change—moving to a country all by herself and letting go of organizing her family’s lives. Margot’s change in lifestyle means that Lara Jean must readapt to a new role in her family. This initially scares Lara Jean and fills her with anxiety, but Lara Jean learns how to organize the family in her own way. She’s different than Margot, and so she changes with this new responsibility.

The theme of positive, but difficult, changes is popular one in the Young Adult genre, because it’s a core lesson that most people don’t learn until their lives start changing. New alliances, lost friends, new opportunities for the future, and shifting relationships are a staple of the adolescent experience, reflected thoroughly in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.