by E. Lockhart
Original Hand-Drawn Map of Beechwood Island
Original Hand-Drawn Sinclair Family Tree
How I Wrote We Were Liars
The Original Book Proposal
Why Are They Called Liars?
Notes I Wrote to Myself
We Were Liars Book Club Meeting:
A Sinclair Family Menu
Readers’ Group Guide
Preview of Genuine Fraud
It has been two and a half years since the publication of We Were Liars in the United States. It was my ninth novel for young adults, and the first one that couldn’t be called a comedy.
My editor and agent were solidly behind the book, but I worried people would find it overdramatic and pretentious. Maybe readers would fling it across the room in anger when they reached the plot twist. Maybe they’d hate my opiate-addicted heiress heroine. Possibly the fairy tales were annoying. I worried critics would say: who does this Lockhart think she is?
But I would rather try and fail than never try at all. There is no point to writing fiction without risks. I would rather anger a reader than bore her. I would rather speak my truth and be laughed at or ignored than stick to what is easy and familiar. My publisher was behind me. I had the support of my editor, the beautiful work of the book’s designers, and the ingenuity of the marketing team. And so the book went out into the world, and We Were Liars became my first bestseller.
Almost all those bad things I worried about came to pass. When people disliked the book, they disliked it quite strongly. Some readers actually did throw it across their rooms. I know, because they told me so on Twitter. But there was also an outpouring of love for We Were Liars. I met people who read it six times, and others who created art and poetry in response. I met people with writing on their hands, and people with open hearts who said they recognized their own families in this hyperprivileged family that didn’t look like theirs on the surface at all.
The love was wonderful. Obviously much nicer than the anger and disdain. But even if everyone had hated We Were Liars and even if almost no one had read it, I would have been glad I took the risks. This book was the thing I wanted to write, and as a smart novelist friend of mine reminded me recently, if everyone likes you—you’re probably a liar.
This deluxe edition includes some new Gat and Cady material that I wrote in late 2016. The characters have stayed with me. I also included a look behind the curtain, sharing a lot of my writing process on the novel. Thank you for reading my work, for throwing it across the room and then maybe rereading it, for making art of your own and crying tears, for battling the giants and witches who attack you in the dark, for enduring.
At the age of eighteen, after finishing her senior year of high school, Cadence Sinclair Eastman spent the summer visiting her father. While living in his Colorado guest room for nine weeks, she waitressed at a doughnut shop and taught tennis lessons in the evenings.
Cady returned to Beechwood Island for only a week’s visit in August of that year. She spent a significant portion of the week felled by migraines: memories, renewed grief, and anxiety about starting college all manifested as cataclysmic pain. She took her new medication.
One morning, waking early after a very long sleep, Cadence went to the attic of her mother’s house, Windemere. She looked through cardboard boxes in search of something to read. On a windowsill she found Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Ghosts of Ashbury High, which she had somehow failed to give away the previous summer. Out of the book spilled a stack of notes in Gat’s handwriting.
My editor asked me to draw the island for her. My map is on the opposite page. I obviously can’t tell north from south! Thank goodness a professional map designer created a beautiful copy.
Drawing a family tree for the Sinclair family wasn’t nearly as hard as drawing the map. I have always had a liking for family trees. As a little girl, my maternal grandfather (who was technically my maternal step-grandfather) made a family tree complete with photographs. There were divorces and remarriages, including his own. I still have a copy. He was a lovely, lovely man, nothing like Harris Sinclair.
I sell my projects on proposal. That means I write up a detailed description of the book and show it to my editor. Hopefully she likes the idea and agrees to publish it. Not every writer works this way, but I like it. It’s an enormous homework assignment: the book is due on a certain date, and I have to deliver it. Also, I get some money in advance, and that’s useful.
Here’s a portion of the proposal for the book that became We Were Liars. You’ll notice a lot of things changed, including the title, but the essence of the book was the same from start to finish. I gave my editor a few sample chapters so she could get an idea of the narrative voice and style, but here I will simply share some excerpts from the overview I submitted.
Let’s Do and Say We Didn’t
A Book Proposal by E. Lockhart
August 10, 2010
Let’s Do and Say We Didn’t is a book about memory loss.
And plain old loss.
And recovery.
It’s a book about privilege and money, the way they can warp people and rip families apart—and the drastic steps some self-righteous kids might take to free themselves of the tyranny of material possessions.
Let’s Do and Say We Didn’t is about family and history; real estate and distorted, juvenile Marxist ideals. It’s about stupid, horrible mistakes, and four cousins—the Bad Liars—who’ve been inseparable all summer, every year.
So most importantly, it’s about best friends—their inside jokes and secret adventures, their deep loyalties and love.
Also, it has a plot twist.
And another.
And ghosts.
The First Act of Let’s Do and Say We Didn’t
Cadence arrives at Beechwood Island after having missed a summer and falls joyfully back into the intense friendship she has with Gat, Nigel, and Mirren. They stay up all night together at the Little House, where they spend most of their time without their parents. They go sailing, build bonfires, share all their thoughts. They make scavenger hunts, exploring the secrets of the island at night.
But we are wondering:
Why did G Harris replace his beautiful old home with a cold modern one?
What’s wrong with him?
Why are the mothers such wrecks, drinking and sobbing on each other’s shoulders?
Why is Cadence giving away her stuff so obsessively, to the point where she has hardly any clothes left, hardly any books, hardly anything?
What is the story accumulating on the Post-it notes stuck to Cadence’s headboard?
What is she not remembering?
The Second Act of Let’s Do and Say We Didn’t
There was a fire. The summer they were fifteen.
No one was hurt, but it destroyed Clairmont, burning family photo albums, priceless heirlooms, and the house itself—a symbol of G Harris’s wealth and entitlement and of the enmity that had developed between the mothers. Most everything the women battled over—the property, the will, the symbolic leadership of the family—it was all destroyed.
The Bad Liars set the fire. A stupid, juvenile, deluded thing to do, arson, but they did it because the bad blood between the mothers was threatening to separate the family forever—to end the summers at Beechwood and to divide Cadence, Gat, Nigel, and Mirren from one another in a bitter family feud.
They convinced themselves that destroying the property would reduce these petty grievances to ashes—and in the spirit of rebellion against their elders and all they stood for, chose a night when the adults had taken the younger kids to a movie off-island and doused the kitchen in gasoline.
The Martha’s Vineyard volunteer fire department didn’t make it across the sound for several hours. Clairmont burnt, lighting up the night sky.
Cadence has made herself forget, but as the memory finally coalesces into a clear picture, she tells herself it was a good thing, in the end. The mothers are together again, aren’t they?
The family quarrels are over.
The Third Act of Let’s Do and Say We Didn’t
Gat, Nigel, and Mirren argue with Cadence about the fire, and whether it was a good idea to have started it. Cadence argues that it changed the family for the better. Gat argues that she’s not seeing the whole picture. He seems to be going back on his old Marxist ideals, but what he’s saying always comes out tangled.
That night, he, Mirren, and Nigel dig out a movie from the bottom of the collection of DVDs in the Little House and watch it.
It’s a horror film. A ghost story of sorts, in which a woman rents a summer home on stilts by the sea. The house is haunted. Drains bubble, paint peels off in strips, rooms are flooded, lights flash on and off, voices echo through the walls. Finally it seems that the sea itself is taking revenge upon the woman, for saving her fisherman husband from a watery grave. The ocean is demanding she sacrifice herself as penance for going against its will.
The movie terrifies Cadence. She wants to stop watching it, but the Bad Liars will not permit her to leave. They say she needs to see it, needs to understand what it means. They argue again—this and the quarrel about the fire are the first arguments they’ve had all summer—and finally Cadence runs out of the Little House and goes to sleep in her own bed in Windemere.
When she wakes up—she remembers.
It’s not true that no one was hurt in the fire.
She, Cadence, was trapped in the pantry when the matches were lit. The door slammed shut with a gust of air, and before she knew it, there was a massive explosion in the kitchen. The door was hot, Cadence was trapped—she kicked her way through the back wall into the laundry room, and as she ran through the rest of the house, she heard several more explosions—the gas tank below the kitchen exploded.
Gat, Nigel, and Mirren. They are all dead. They have been dead all summer. Ghosts, staying with Cadence for one last season together, reassuring her of their love and helping her heal a guilt so huge she has not even been able to acknowledge what happened.
That is why Cadence didn’t come to Beechwood last summer. No one did. Clairmont was in ruins, the family in mourning. This year, they are beginning to heal.
The fire destroying their coveted property didn’t bring the Sinclair sisters together—their grief at losing their children did. This is what is wrong with G Harris, and why he built a new home so unlike his old one. This is why Cadence is giving away everything she owns. She’s not living a half-Marxist, minimalist ideal. She’s trying to erase her past.
The Bad Liars are leaving Beechwood now. Cadence knows they forgive her and will always love her, but the summer is over. She has her memory back, and it’s time to move on.
Readers often ask me why the Liars are called the Liars. In the proposal and early drafts of the novel, I had included an explanation of how they got their nickname in the family. I ended up cutting it. I didn’t want too much emphasis on the characters in childhood. Here’s the explanation from the proposal:
We are the Bad Liars because Nana Phyll called us that one summer, after we tracked mud onto the oriental rug in the Clairmont living room, fed the Irish setters all the leftover roast beef, took the rowboat out without permission, and lied about it all.
“It wasn’t us!” I said. “Ashton is always in the fridge.”
“You always blame us for things,” cried Nigel. “We were in the attic all morning.”
“It was probably the twins,” said Mirren. “They always want to go on the boat.”
Nana put her hands on her hips. “You are such bad liars.” She sighed. “I should send you to bed without supper.”
But she didn’t punish us. We still got homemade ice cream for dessert, and the name she’d given us stuck. Cadence, Gat, Nigel and Mirren. The Bad Liars.
There are lots of other children, of course. We’ve got little sisters and brothers, all of us but Gat. There’s my brother, Ashton, and cousins Elizabeth, Grace, Johnny and Sky.
But they are young and silly.
They don’t matter. Not to me, anyhow.
Often as I work on a novel, I give myself a bit of a pep talk on the page. I write down some of my big dreams for a project, as well as things I want to remember, themes I want to develop, ideas I hope will make it into the book. Then I’ll look back at that document as I reread a full draft, asking myself if I have done what I set out to do.
Here are some notes I wrote to myself during the writing process. Ironically, I have no memory of writing any of it.
What does Cadence want?
Right now she doesn’t want much.
She wants Gat.
She wants to stop the fighting between the aunties and Harris. The fighting has to be really bad and must threaten to pull her apart from the Liars.
But in the moment of summer 17: she has to think only that she wants to find out what happens to her.
Can something threaten her?
Something could turn up in the notes she writes on her wall. Like, Don’t trust this summer? Don’t trust Harris? Don’t trust Gat?
—
The novelist E. M. Forster once said that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. After I finish each chapter, read it with an eye toward figuring out where I’ve played it safe, where I backed off, where the small astonishment gets lost. As I write, find the symbolic core.
What is the island about?
What am I saying about grief?
What am I saying about guilt?
What is my magical system? Question of how to handle the memory loss:
In Chime, Franny Billingsley’s narrator says she remembers everything—but she has questions about what she remembers.
In The Others, Nicole Kidman’s character thinks she is one situation but really she is another and misinterprets everything through the lens of that. Note: I should watch that movie, not just read about it on Wikipedia.
In The Sixth Sense, we actually see the traumatic event that killed the doctor, but we think it was just an event that made him sorry he failed to help one kid who has ESP—and that therefore he becomes especially devoted when he has the chance to try to help another.
—
Cady’s unconscious desire is to (1) punish herself for killing the Liars, and (2) stop herself from remembering that it even happened.
Cadence needs to take action to get what she wants, and it has to fail.
Story is: inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution.
The inciting incident radically upsets the balance of a character’s life. The protagonist must react to the inciting incident, and without much delay, and thus the protagonist arrives at a desire.
—
Structure: An alternate way to structure the whole thing is to just start with arriving in the seventeenth summer. Then do all the flashbacks when Cadence remembers them committing arson.
Yet another way is to structure it so as to somehow start with the fire at Clairmont. The question the reader asks then becomes: how did they come around to committing arson? (As in The Secret History by Donna Tartt—how did they come around to committing murder?)
Cadence needs to work to uncover information. But the problem is nobody is hiding stuff from her. The doctors must have said she needs to be treated very gently. Something like that.
One way Dickens does things is to make a generalization: it was bad. And then he says, let me give an example. Then a scene that illustrates it. Then he says, that was how it was. Then that scene stands in for the whole in a very useful way. There are four stories:
1. What at first appears to have happened: Cadence has had an accident that hurt her head. She has bad headaches.
2. The theories of what happened. Cadence has memory loss because of the accident. Maybe someone hurt her, etc.
3. And then: Cadence committed arson and it helped heal the family.
4. Cadence committed arson and killed the Liars.
Love story: What stops them?
In the latter half, it’s because he’s a ghost.
But in the fifteen-year-old parts—what stops them? Does anything?
Summer 17, one thing can be that Gat and Cadence are vulnerable with each other. She is risking something in giving him her heart. And he is risking something in giving her his—because he will never be with her.
Find a kind of banter they have together. Figure out the structure of the romance in the arc of the novel. The question has to be: why is he pushing her away?
We Were Liars Book Club Meeting: A Sinclair Family Menu
I love to cook, and writing the foodie parts of We Were Liars was fun. It occurred to me that people discussing the novel with their book clubs might like to eat some Beechwood Island food. I got the idea to create a Sinclair family menu—check it out below.
Eating like the Sinclairs isn’t hard; it just takes some attention to detail. You should definitely drink white wine, if that’s legal for the members of your book club. Otherwise, knock back copious amounts of lemonade, both strawberry and fizzy, and eat these snacks.
When your book club discussion is done, please remember: lie about this book.
* * *
~APPETIZERS~
Smoked salmon spread, from Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Family Style, one of my favorite cookbooks: foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/smoked-salmon-dip-recipe.html
Serve with: washed and trimmed baby vegetables such as zucchini, baby carrots, and tiny red peppers, and sliced baguette
Runny, smelly cheeses such as Camembert or Brie, Epoisses, Affidélice, or L’Explorateur. (Don’t get Havarti. It’s not even a good cheese.)
Serve with: Carr’s Table Water Crackers. These are nice and floury, the way the Sinclairs like them, but really, any cracker you like will do.
Add some Stonewall Kitchen onion jam for a nice accompaniment: stonewallkitchen.com/shop/speciality-foods/jams-jellies-butters/jams/Roasted_Garlic_Onion_Jam.html