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We were Liars by E Lockhart

  • Writer: Ninay Desai
    Ninay Desai
  • Jun 20
  • 4 min read

Updated: Jul 4

We were Liars is a young adult novel about the privileged Sinclair family who spend their summers on their private island, Beechwood, off the coast of Massachusetts. E Lockhart portrays them as the quintessential wealthy American family—blonde, beautiful, and square-jawed—à la Kennedys. The Sinclairs live their lives in the lap of laid-back luxury, with an undercurrent of scheming and grasping for the attention and patronage of the family’s patriarch, Harris Sinclair. This is the sort of family where it is normal to toss out furniture, jewellery, clothes, wedding china and silverware as a way to cope with the end of a marriage. After all, what are art galleries and Tiffany’s for?


Granddad and Grandma Sinclair have three beautiful daughters—Carrie, Penny and Bess—known ‘for their cashmere cardigans and grand parties’. Between the three of them, they have seven children, with Cadence, Johnny and Mirren being the older cousins. Along with their Indian-American friend, Gat Patil (who is also the nephew of Carrie’s long-time beau, Ed), they are the ‘liars’ from the novel’s title.


On a teak table, a copy of E Lockhart's novel We were Liars lies open near a blue drink. Tossed near the book is a satin scarf with a paisley pattern. Photo by Ninay Desai

Does the epithet of ‘liars’ given to them by Grandma Tipper hint at the unreliability of their accounts? Perhaps. Especially Cadence, since she is the narrator of the story. She tells us she suffered an accident on Beechwood Island when she was fifteen years old. And now she suffers from terrible migraines and can’t recall events surrounding the accident. The subject of what happened that summer is taboo in the Sinclair family. Ostensibly because Cadence’s doctors want her to regain her memory in her own time. The crux of the story is Cadence trying to pry out what really happened that summer.


As a result, We were Liars oscillates between the summer when Cadence and her cousins are seventeen years old and the summer of the accident, two years ago. Cadence's mysterious accident is what spurs along this otherwise fairly uneventful book. Apart from that, nothing really happens in terms of plot except conversations about status and money between the adults and some banal chats and pretentious posturing that only teenagers think of as ‘grown-up’. Even that would be okay if there was some character development.


Cadence, the protagonist and narrator, is a whiny, poor little rich girl under the impression that giving away things she didn’t work for counts as charity and somehow morally elevated, compared to her mother and aunts who fight over property, trust funds and heirlooms. It’s all quite pretentious and hypocritical especially when she casually makes elitist remarks which prove the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.


“One night, the four of us ate a picnic down on the tiny beach. Steamed clams, potatoes, and sweet corn. The staff made it. I didn’t know their names.”

Thoughtless elitism like this never seems to strike her as inconsiderate till the great love of her young life, Gat, who is the only mildly interesting character in the book, shines a light on her obliviousness. Their love story has all the theatrical hamminess of most adolescent love stories but I can’t complain given that this is Young Adult fiction. You could say I signed up for it.


That said, Cadence, with her constant self-centred whining about her own misery, is hard to root for. And frankly, her melodramatic description of events had me confused in the beginning (while I was still figuring out if it was literal) and rolling my eyes later. Sample this:


“Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound, then from my eyes, my ears, my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.”

This passage describes Cadence's father’s departure after he decides to separate from her mother, Penny and move to another part of the country. There was no gun or physical violence involved. Not unless you count my palm slapping my forehead at the horror of this purple prose.


Apart from Cadence's melodramatic musings, E Lockhart uses a style that mirrors the immediacy and unstructured free flow of a stream of consciousness narrative. It makes sense given the age, personality and mental state of the narrator.


The primary theme of We were Liars is privilege and the corrosiveness of wealth and how it can hold us hostage, even when things look positively rosy from the outside, as it does for beautiful Sinclair family. E Lockhart shows how wealth and forced smiles fill the gaps where relationships and love should have been, perpetuating feelings of hollowness.


We were Liars would’ve been a lot more enjoyable if it didn’t rely so heavily on the twist at the end to elevate the story and if its protagonist was less shrill in her unpunctuated self-pity. The last chapters had some traces of self-introspection. If only they had come sooner.


2 Comments


Guest
Jun 22

Will check it out if it's actually this boring. I believe there a movie being made based on this story.

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Ninay Desai
Ninay Desai
Jun 22
Replying to

Do check it out and let us know what you make of it. Also, the book's been adapted into an Amazon Prime series.

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