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.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Girl: Day 1”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to murder, violence, kidnapping, self-harm, child abuse, and police harassment.
An unnamed young woman—later revealed to be Madison Perkins—narrates her awakening in a ditch at the side of a rural Oregon road. She is in great pain and has no idea where she is or how she got there. It is completely dark, and she is cold and panicked. She can hear cars passing now and then, and she struggles to get herself on her feet. She notices that she is covered in bruises and there are blood stains on her clothing. When she touches her nose, her hands come away bloody. She worries that her nose might be broken. Suddenly, she has a single flash of memory: She is standing at a bank of mailboxes when large hands reach for her. Her panic soars as she wonders whether she was abducted. No further memories come to her, however: It is “Like there’s a wall between [her] and understanding what’s happening” (3). Slowly, she makes her way out of the ditch and onto the road. She is badly startled when she sees flashing lights and hears a police siren.
Flooded with relief, she turns toward the cruiser. An officer’s voice orders her to freeze. As the officer exits the car and approaches her, she looks down and realizes she is covered with dirt and blood. When the officer is close enough to see her clearly, he realizes that she is a teenager and in trouble. He asks whether someone hurt her, but before she can form a response, her knees give way and she falls to the ground. The officer rushes to help her. When he asks her name, she suddenly realizes she has no idea who she is.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Girl: Day 1”
The narrative jumps forward a few hours. The young woman is now in a tiny police station with the young Alton, Oregon, officer who found her on the road, Officer Bowman. A paramedic has examined her and noted a head injury, various scrapes and bruises, and a bruised but not broken nose. Her injuries look recent—only hours old—and are consistent with something like a car accident. She has refused any further medical care. Bowman has wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and given her a cup of hot chocolate to drink. He asks a series of questions about her identity—her name, age, and so on—but she can recall nothing. He decides they should look through area missing persons reports to see if they can spot her picture and find some family contact information. An hour later, they are no closer to learning her identity.
Someone bangs on the outer door of the station. The young woman waits in the inner office while Bowman goes out to see who is there. When he opens the door, a man tells him that he is looking for help in finding his missing teenage daughter, Mary. Curious, the young woman edges toward the office door, but she cannot yet see the man. The man introduces himself as Wayne Boone and describes his daughter: She is 17, has green eyes, brown hair, and freckles, and is about 5’5” inches tall. Realizing that this description matches that of the young woman in his office, Bowman cautiously admits that Wayne’s daughter may have been found. He asks Wayne for identification. The young woman steps farther forward, and Wayne catches sight of her. He is overjoyed, but the young woman feels no answering flicker of emotion or familiarity. Wayne shows them photos of Mary on his phone. The young woman feels sure that these photos, taken at various ages, are of her—but she has no memory of any of the occasions on which they were taken. Wayne explains that he and Mary were driving separately from their house to his fishing cabin; when Mary did not arrive as expected, he began searching for her. He provides an old school ID of Mary’s and says that, if Bowman will come with him to his cabin, he can also provide Mary’s birth certificate and other documentation. The young woman begins to accept what Wayne is telling them: She is Mary Boone.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Drew”
The story’s point of view shifts to the narrative of Drew, a high-school senior living in Washington City, Oregon, who is in the library trying to copy a missing-person flier. Drew’s girlfriend, Lola Scott, has disappeared, and most of the people in his small community believe that he is responsible. He is angry at the way the sheriff and his community are treating him, and he is desperate to find Lola. His cousin Max shows up, looking for Drew. Max, who is as worried about Drew as the rest of the family is, expresses concern about Drew’s state of mind. Lola has been gone for weeks, and Drew is still pouring himself into making fliers and trying to figure out what happened—but Max wonders if it is time for Drew to accept that Lola may be dead. Drew understands his family’s concern, but he secretly feels responsible for her disappearance. The only way to assuage his guilt is to keep looking for Lola.
Max reminds Drew that Drew’s fathers are hosting a family dinner, but Drew does not feel up to attending. Max slips up and reveals that the police are searching at the Willamette river again, near the boat launch where Lola disappeared. Drew insists on going there to see who is in attendance, feeling that anyone looking for a body has lost faith that Lola will return. Max goes with him. At the river, Drew is hurt to see that Lola’s parents are there. Before Lola went missing, Drew had a warm relationship with them—but now, they treat him like a pariah.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Drew”
Drew drops Max off back at the library. Max begs him to stop doing things that make him look guilty—like showing up at the river while Mark Roane, the town sheriff, is searching there. Max urges Drew to find more productive ways to look for Lola; maybe he can even find evidence that will point Roane in another direction and get him to stop harassing Drew. Drew drives off, intending to put up fliers in some local neighborhoods. As he posts the fliers, he finds himself walking toward Lola’s neighborhood. He knows that going there will only make him look more suspicious, but he misses Lola terribly and cannot stop himself from walking by her house. He forces himself to just spend a minute nearby, and then turns to head back to his car. Mr. Scott’s Jeep is in the road behind him.
Lola’s father confronts Drew, telling him to stay away from them. When Drew tries to remind Mr. Scott that the Scotts have known Drew for a long time and have always liked and trusted him, Mr. Scott says that he apparently doesn’t know Drew at all, because the Drew he thought he knew would never have left Lola to walk home alone in the dark and then waited until the next day to call to check on whether she got home safely. He is also shocked that Drew has stopped cooperating with the sheriff’s department. Drew is overwhelmed with guilt. Mrs. Scott gets out of the Jeep and asks Drew to just confess and help them find Lola’s body. Drew is hurt and angry, and though he protests his innocence, Mr. Scott tells him to leave and never come back. The Scotts leave him standing there, devastated. Before Drew can recover himself, Lola’s best friend and neighbor, the sheriff’s daughter, Autumn, comes out to confront Drew, as well. Drew has been friends with Autumn for years, even before he started dating Lola, and her belief in his guilt is painful. He tells Autumn that if she were accused of something similar, he would never believe in her guilt. Autumn replies that she has “known […] for weeks” that Drew was guilty, but she refuses to explain her evidence (41).
Exhausted, Drew returns home. He goes into his room and immediately starts looking over the whiteboard where he has assembled everything he knows about the day Lola disappeared. The display includes the last picture he has of Lola, taken at the boat launch that night. He knows nothing about her movements after that except that she walked home, stopping at a convenience store along the way at about midnight. Drew’s fathers knock on his door, anxious to check on him. They also have some news to reluctantly share: The police have found a body.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Mary: Day 1”
As the young woman, who now thinks of herself as “Mary,” steps out of the police station, she sees that Alton is a tiny town: The only businesses she can see are an abandoned motel and a gas station. Before Wayne gets into his van, he offers to stop and get her first-aid supplies, promising that things are going to be fine, because they can get through anything together. He hands her a denim jacket with floral sleeves, saying she must be cold. The style puzzles her, as something tells her she is not “a floral person” (48). She is touched by Wayne’s kindness, but she is still confused and overwhelmed by her situation. Bowman takes her in his car, following Wayne up the dark mountain to Wayne’s isolated fishing cabin. Mary finds the location “ominous,” but follows Bowman inside. Bowman thoroughly checks out the cabin’s various rooms, and Wayne shows Mary her own room. She is taken aback by the Christian fiction and overly cheerful decor, feeling that none of it reflects her taste. Wayne shows Bowman the promised documentation of Mary’s identity. Before Bowman leaves, he gives Mary his card, telling her to call him if she has any concerns.
Wayne drives back into town to get them food and first aid supplies. The young woman gets into the shower, grateful to finally get warm and clean. When she finishes, she dresses in some clothes of Wayne’s, since none of her own clothes have made it to the cabin with her. She looks in the mirror, feeling distressed at still being unable to recognize her own face. She goes into her room and lies down on soft sheets, grateful for this small comfort. She cries herself to sleep, whispering to herself that she is Mary Boone.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Chapters 1-5 introduce the main characters and establish the narrative’s settings of Alton, the fishing cabin, and Washington City. They lay out the book’s central conflicts—one for each of the two protagonists, Madison and Drew, who are introduced through their own first-person narration. This initial section of the book establishes a pattern that will hold for most of the story: Madison will narrate two chapters and then Drew will narrate two chapters. Alternating narrators is a technique often used in thrillers and suspense novels; not only does it perform the same function as it would in any other genre—allowing the reader to get to know more than one character through the intimacy of the first-person perspective—but it also allows for the creation of more cliffhanger moments, as the narration switches perspective and temporarily suspends the forward progress of one story to focus on the other.
At this point in the story, Megan Lally is engaged in misdirection regarding how these two narrative strands intersect. Madison—who currently knows herself as “Mary Boone”—is suffering from amnesia and is staying in an isolated cabin with a man claiming to be her father. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 are told from Madison’s perspective. Because Madison does not yet have any sense of her identity, Chapters 1 and 2 are titled “Girl.” Chapter 5’s title, “Mary,” establishes the convention that her chapter titles will shift as her sense of identity shifts. That she so easily begins to believe in the fiction of her identity as Wayne’s daughter, Mary, signals her vulnerability and Wayne’s skill at manipulation.
Lally plants several clues that foreshadow the revelation that the young woman is not Mary Boone. Madison’s first flash of memory is of a potential abduction. Then, she notes differences in her own face and that of Mary in the photographs Wayne shows—but she attributes these differences to the passage of time and to her current injuries. In Chapter 5, when Wayne hands her the jacket that supposedly belongs to Mary, she finds its style off-putting. Similarly, when Wayne shows her the bedroom he claims is hers, the books and decor strike Madison as wrong, somehow—she looks at the books and thinks, “I don’t think these are mine” (51). Given the strong foreshadowing that Madison is not Mary Boone, her central conflict is about whether she will recover her memory and escape from the danger she is in. This plot introduces the book’s thematic interest in Memory’s Role in Identity. Since Drew’s central conflict relates to Lola’s disappearance and his desire to find her and prove his innocence, a reasonable inference is that “Mary” is actually Lola. This is misdirection, however, a key genre technique for maintaining tension and suspense. Toward the end of the story, it will be revealed that Lola is actually one of Wayne’s previous victims, already dead by the time Wayne abducts Madison.
This misdirection is part of a larger theme in the work: The Deceptive Nature of Appearances. The young woman wandering down the dark mountain road at the beginning of the narrative is not, as Wayne Boone tells her, Mary Boone, and Wayne is not her loving father. Nor is she actually Lola, as the reader is being led to guess. Drew is not the killer that everyone in his town believes him to be, and his suspicious actions—going to the river, visiting Lola’s house, and so on—are not truly indicators that he has committed a vicious crime. Even his own thoughts are misleading: He mentions his feelings of guilt and responsibility several times, creating the appearance that he might well have done something to harm Lola. Later in the narrative, however, he reveals that these feelings simply stem from his having broken up with Lola on the night she disappeared.
Both Drew’s and Madison’s stories help to develop the text’s thematic interest in The Dangers of Isolation. Since Madison is alone with a stranger who is lying about her identity and posing as her father, it matters that she is cut off from help. The cabin is in a remote location, and Madison has no way to get into town on her own—and even if she did, the town itself is not a promising source of assistance. In Chapter 1, Madison’s description of the “creepy road” as “silent as the grave” contributes to the atmosphere of isolation and danger (7), as does her later description of the small, near-deserted town of Alton. The fishing cabin where she eventually ends up with Wayne is even more isolated. It is so dark that she “can’t even see the edge of the driveway” (49), and she once again uses the word “creepy” to describe her surroundings.
Drew, in his own way, is also isolated. Though he is located in a slightly larger town and surrounded by community, the community has turned its back on him. People stare and make nasty comments wherever he goes, and aside from his own family, those he has been closest to—Autumn and the Scotts—openly accuse him of killing Lola. The sheriff, Mark Roane, harasses him and brings him in for questioning over and over. Drew is also harboring a secret that makes him feel he cannot be completely open with Max and his dads. Although this secret is not as damning as he believes it to be, his feelings of guilt are intense and further isolate him. He feels that he has nowhere to turn, and his behavior grows increasingly erratic. Drew may not be alone with a dangerous stranger, but his future looks bleak: He is on his way to becoming a social pariah and may even end up serving time in prison for a crime he did not commit.
