Everything You Want Me to Be

About Everything You Want Me to Be

Everything You Want Me to Be is a psychological thriller by Mindy Mejia, published in 2017 by Emily Bestler Books/Atria (Simon & Schuster). The novel opens with a simple, devastating fact: Hattie Hoffman is dead. She was a high school girl in a small Minnesota town — a good student, a good daughter, a good girlfriend — found brutally stabbed. What follows is the slow excavation of who Hattie actually was beneath the surface of that carefully maintained performance.

The novel is structured around three intersecting perspectives, each with its own timeline. There is the detective investigating Hattie's murder in the present. There is Hattie's English teacher, Peter, whose perspective reveals a relationship with Hattie that was inappropriate and whose choices set events in motion that he cannot undo. And there is Hattie herself, narrating the year before her death in her own voice — ambitious, calculating, hungry for a larger life than her small town will give her, and willing to perform whatever version of herself the situation requires.

Identity, Performance, and the Cost of Invisibility

The novel's central insight is embedded in its title. Hattie is extraordinarily good at being everything the people around her want her to be. She is the ideal student for her teacher. The ideal daughter for her parents. The ideal girlfriend for her boyfriend. She is so skilled at reflection that she becomes almost opaque — you cannot see through her performance to what is underneath because there are too many performances layered on top of each other.

Mejia uses Hattie's story to examine what it costs a young woman to be so relentlessly adaptable. The performance is exhausting. And it is also dangerous, because it means that when Hattie makes a choice that is purely, selfishly her own — when she decides to reach for something she actually wants, regardless of who it inconveniences — she has no protection. No one really knows her well enough to understand what she's doing or why.

Why Everything You Want Me to Be Has Been Challenged

The novel has been banned pending investigation in Orange County Public Schools in Florida. As an adult thriller with a teenage protagonist at its center, the book deals with sexual content, violence, and an inappropriate relationship between a teacher and a student — themes that school district review processes frequently flag. The sexual content and the specificity of that inappropriate relationship are the most likely grounds for the challenge.

The irony is that the relationship between Peter and Hattie is not presented as romantic or aspirational. The novel is clear-eyed about the power imbalance, about Peter's failures of judgment and ethics, and about the way that Hattie's skill at being what others want makes her vulnerable to exactly this kind of situation. It is a cautionary story as much as anything else. But for a review process that evaluates books by the presence of certain content rather than its treatment, that distinction often gets lost.