September Book Club: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

A slow, suspenseful build to a devastating conclusion made We Were Liars impossible to put down. This is the sort of book that sticks with you, and that you might find yourself poring over several times, finding new details and meaning in every read. This book has it all: mystery, romance, tragedy, family feuding, even selective amnesia. I was left pretty stunned at the end of the book, too. If you haven’t read it yet, now’s the time to check out a copy! At the risk of spoiling it for you, please read the book before you continue (then come back to discuss it).

 

 

I’m not sure that everyone had the same reaction that I did, so first, let’s start with a basic question:

On the surface, Cadence (Cady) Sinclair lives a charmed life: beautiful things, a beautiful home, and beloved grandparents who own a private island off the Massachusetts coast. Cady and her mother, cousins, and aunts gather on Beechwood Island every summer. The Liars (the older teens) have a magical summer every year together, then go back to their lives in different cities. Gat, Mirren, Johnny, and Cady have spent time together on the island since they were young, and now they are fifteen (each summer is named for their shared age, so “summer fifteen” is when things start to get interesting).

Obviously despite Cady’s family’s wealth, Cady is very unhappy. There are a lot of secrets and feuds in her family; money and possessions seem to cause tons of tension. The aunts are constantly competing over who should own which house on Beechwood Island. The whole Beechwood Estate belongs to Cadence’s grandfather, Harris Sinclair, who often gives his daughters financial support. Unfortunately, this leads Cady’s mother and aunts to compete for his favour while the grandchildren, including Cady, are left to their own devices on a lonely private island. Summer fifteen, Cady spends her first hours on the island falling in love with Gat. Unfortunately, Gat has a girlfriend back home. To add insult to injury, Cady’s grandfather doesn’t approve of Gat, and he certainly doesn’t like the budding romance between the two teens. This doesn’t stop them, however: as summer fifteen flies on, Cady and Gat become more and more involved, and more comfortable with the idea of being together despite the tension that their relationship is creating with Harris. Did you feel like her grandfather was treating Gat badly? Do you think that the other Liars accepted their relationship?

Then there’s an accident. All of a sudden, we don’t really know what happened during summer fifteen after Cady and Gat fell in love, and neither does Cady. We only know that something awful happened, leaving her badly injured and unable to remember why or how. One night, she wakes up cold and alone on the beach. The only thing that she remembers is this: “ I plunged down into this ocean, down to the rocky bottom, and all I could see was the base of Beechwood Island and my arms and legs felt numb but my fingers were cold. Slices of seaweed went past as I fell.” We rejoin Cady at sixteen, recovering from terrible trauma. Her only explanation is that she went swimming alone at night and hit her head on a rock. She has post-traumatic headaches. She feels like something awful has happened but she can’t remember how she ended up on the beach, alone. She remembers some details leading up to what happened, but she can’t seem to put it all together. That summer, she goes to Europe instead of going back to Beechwood; her parents, now separated, insist that it would be better for her this way. She doesn’t hear from any of the Liars, but she writes them little messages, then begins to send them her favourite possessions from childhood. In fact, Cady begins to get rid of many of her possessions. What did you think of this gesture? Why do you think Cady was really giving away her things?

Summer seventeen is when Cady is finally ready to go back to the island, and her mother agrees to letting her stay for one month. When Cady returns to Beechwood Island, nothing is as she remembers it, except for the Liars. Beechwood has been completely rebuilt. Her aunts are hugging each other and getting along like a loving family (for the most part). Cady spends most of her time holed up in one of her aunt’s houses with the Liars, and no one bothers them. They don’t really talk about the accident (everyone has been told not to), but Cady asks about it a lot and each time hears the same thing: she’ll remember when she’s ready. Gat and Cady rekindle their romance, and Gat apologizes for not replying to Cady’s e-mails, and for cheating on his girlfriend with Cady. Slowly, Cady begins to reconstruct what she thinks might have happened to her during summer fifteen. While you were reading for the first time, did you trust Cady’s memories? Did you feel like they lent any clues to what really happened?

Cady’s family is very good at burying secrets and emotions, which is made clear by their treatment of Grandmother Tipper’s death. The Sinclairs also don’t talk about what happened during summer fifteen. They certainly don’t talk about the issues of family politics, race, and class that are keeping Johnny’s mother from marrying Gat’s father. However, at the end of the book we even see Ed, Gat’s father, at Beechwood having dinner with the family. Do you think that Cady’s family changed after the accident? Before the accident, do you think that her family was as unhappy and dysfunctional as Cady thought they were?

I found myself reading this book again to pick up on the clues left along the way. Lockhart did a really good job of making the Liars seem real even when they were just in Cady’s mind: if you read it again, you can see that the Liars are like ghosts suspended in time (but still very real to Cady). You can see scraps of what happened in Cady’s memories of the events leading up to the fire. You begin to understand why Cady’s family seems so different between summers fifteen and seventeen, and why Cady was so angered by the way that her family was behaving toward one another. Did you feel like Cady was a reliable narrator? The ghosts of the Liars provided a fascinating backdrop for summer seventeen. Especially when I read it again, I saw how each Liar was actually a different part of Cady’s subconscious as she tried to piece together the accident. Did you notice that Johnny kept trying to tell her what happened, but that Mirren and Gat would stop him? Cady even wonders about reality splitting: she asks herself if different choices could lead to different lives. What do you think of the idea of how different choices can create different realities? Do you think that if the Liars had lived, they might have behaved the same way during summer seventeen?

When we find out what has really happened to Cady and her family, it’s toward the end of the book. It seems that Cady blames herself for what happened, but as a reader it might have been less clear. We do know that what the Liars did was partly Cady’s idea, and that her family is unwilling to lay blame and instead lend her unending support. We also know that the Liars believed that they were burning down Beechwood Manor for the right reasons: to protest the tyranny of her grandfather’s rule, and to bring the family together. Ironically it did, but not in the way that they had intended. They said (in Cady’s words), “We burned not a home, but a symbol.” Did you find the Liar’s motives confusing? Do you think Cady was really the ring-leader, or do you think her guilt was so unbearable that she felt that she needed to take the blame? Especially toward the end, there are a lot of fairy-tale like chapters that describe a king and his three daughters. The interludes, which are a blend of fairy tale and Shakespeare’s King Lear, were an interesting way to show Cady’s family dynamics. Did you feel like those added another layer to the story? Do you think that those stories, perhaps like the Liars during summer seventeen, was a way for Cady to explain why the Liars did what they did?

Lockhart has a great talent for writing well in many different genres, and We Were Liars is quite different from some of her other works (my favourite so far besides this one is The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks). This brings us to our final question: