All I Ever Do Is Leave

Reading for Mimesis and Theme in Last Night in Montreal

Through its use of multiple perspectives and a shifting timeline, the novel Last night in Montreal, by Emily St. John Mandel, provides us with the opportunity to discover the story of one of the protagonists, Lilia Albert, and the impact her life has on the other characters involved. After being abducted by her father at the age of seven, Lilia spends the next fifteen years traveling across the country with him, leaving lives, aliases, and later, lovers, behind. The novel is not only told through Lilia’s point of view, but also those of Eli, the boyfriend she abandons in Brooklyn at the beginning of the novel, Christopher, the detective who dedicates his life to following her, and Michaela, the daughter Christopher abandoned while pursuing Lilia. This shift of narrators gives readers with the opportunity to see Lilia from a perspective other than her own, and provides more insight into who she is.

When I began to analyze the mimetic themes present in Last Night in Montreal, I was interested in investigating the meaning behind the controlling idea that shaped Lilia’s life. As long as she can remember, Lilia has spent her days traveling back and forth across the country, never putting down roots or forming meaningful relationships. Because of this, Lilia has forgotten what it’s like to stay, and subsequently deems herself incapable of doing so, at one point saying to Erica, her then-girlfriend:

You’re not listening. You don’t get it. It isn’t admirable. I cannot stop. All I ever do is leave…I am always running out of time. This, is all, I ever, do, and there is absolutely nothing admirable about it.

pgs. 78-79

As is evident through the above quote, by the time Lilia has grown into an adult, the controlling value in her life is her desire for stability. However, stability has no meaning to her, having never experienced it. Due to this, she feels that she has no choice but to continue to live a nomadic life, flitting from city to city time and time again.

Still, if we dive further back into Lilia’s past, we see that this was not always the controlling value which ruled her life. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, she was content with her nomadic existence, during the time in her life when it was just her, her father, and the wide open road. However, around her sixteenth birthday, her father met a woman he wanted to settle down with, and Lilia realized that she had no idea how to have a home. While her father had known a life prior to his years of ceaseless traveling, the same was not the case for Lilia, who had no memories of her prior life with her mother. When she and her father first began staying with his girlfriend, Clara, Lilia reflected on it, saying:

Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable.

pg. 179

Here, you can see the shift between before and after for Lilia. Before her father settled down, Lilia loved life on the road. However, soon after embarking on her own journey, she realized that it was not the life she ultimately wanted, but the only one that she knew. However, if we go back further, to when Lilia was first abducted by her father, the controlling value is quite different.

To understand this, we must first discuss the logistics of Lilia’s abduction. A few nights after being thrown through a window by her mother, seven-year-old Lilia sees her estranged father outside her window in the middle of the night and walks outside to join him. Even at a young age, Lilia knew how to leave.

From this, we can infer that during that time in her life, Lilia’s controlling value was the idea that leaving will save you. She was not safe with her mother, and recognizing that, chose to follow her father into the unknown. This idea that leaving will protect you continues on through Lilia’s life as her and her father evade the detective throughout the story, and it only ever changes once her father chooses to stop traveling.

This shift in controlling values was interesting to me because while Lilia always viewed her life in terms of the places she left behind, throughout her whole childhood the one constant she had was her father. Only when he leaves her, choosing to stay in one place, does she realize that up until this point she was never actually leaving behind the one thing that mattered to her: her father.

At this point, I would like to discuss McKee’s value graph, which tracks the positive and negative charges of the novel, and gives way to the overarching controlling and counter ideas that structure the novel.

The value graph for Lilia’s portion of the text is as follows:

(-) Lilia is abducted by her father

(+) Lilia has the realization that she does not want to be found when she sees herself on television

(-) Lilia’s father meets a woman and settles down, while Lilia realizes the is incapable of staying in one place

(-) Lilia spends the next six years traveling alone, abandoning lovers in every city that she leaves

(-) Lilia abandons Eli and takes off for Montreal

(+) Lilia finds out why her father abducted her, which gives her the closure she needed to move on and be able to stay in one place

(+) Ten years later, we see Lilia in Italy celebrating her seventh wedding anniversary

A controlling idea is defined by McKee as a single sentence that describes how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end. The controlling idea of Last Night in Montreal is that in order to move forward in your life, you must confront the meaning behind your past.

In Lilia’s case, she is unable to confront this meaning until she learns what occurred between her and her mother when she was a small child. Once she comes to remember that her mother threw her through a window, she can rationalize the meaning behind her father taking her away. He did it to protect her, not because traveling was the only way of life, and this realization allows her to understand that there is nothing inherently wrong with staying in one place.

We can see that this is the idea that wins in the novel, since after finding out the truth about her past, Lilia is finally able to let go of her compulsive need to repeatedly leave everything behind, get married, and settle down in one place.

The counter idea of the text is that if you confront the meaning behind your past, it will destroy you. For the majority of the novel, Lilia abides by this idea, choosing not to pursue the truth of her past, instead opting to repress the memories of her early childhood, as well as make no effort to find her mother. Through these actions, she demonstrates her fear of the meaning behind her past.

However, as the novel progresses, we are able to recognize that Lilia is slowly abandoning her belief that confronting your past will destroy you, as she makes the decision to go to Montreal to meet Michaela, the only person who is willing to tell her the truth about her childhood. In doing this, we understand that Lilia has shifted from the belief that dealing with your past will destroy you, to the idea that confronting the meaning behind your past is the only way to move forward.

To conclude, this text essentially forced me to be a submissive reader. It contained a lot of chapters that ended in cliffhangers and provided no clues of what would happen next. Since I couldn’t figure out the pattern, about a third of the way through the text I gave up on it and decided that I would sit back and let the text guide me. By allowing the text to take the lead, I felt that I was more open to different interpretations and directions, and less prone to seeing the story through one singular lens.