What’s in it for me? A compelling story of dark family secrets.
To the world, the Sinclair family presents a perfect facade: they’re incredibly wealthy, extremely high achieving, and, above all, happy. But in private, cracks are beginning to appear in their carefully crafted self-image. Tensions arise between the family’s three generations over who will inherit the family’s massive estate when patriarch Harris Sinclair eventually dies. And the younger Sinclairs, Harris’s grandchildren, are beginning to question their family’s extreme privilege and the systems of structural oppression that underpin it.
Then, something unspeakably awful happens. Something that will shake the Sinclairs to their core. But Cadence Sinclair, who was at the center of this tragedy, can’t remember what happened. Told over the course of three summers, this is the story of the build-up to that traumatic event, and Cadence’s struggle, in its aftermath, to remember and articulate exactly what happened.
In the Sinclair family, not everything is as it seems.
Meet the Sinclairs. Old money. East coast. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant as anything.
Harris Sinclair is the gruff, business-minded patriarch; Tipper, his wife, is just as charming in her 80s as when she was a debutante. Their three girls, Carrie, Bessie, and Penny (all divorced, but no one talks about that) have a gaggle of children between them. All three generations of Sinclairs are tall, blonde, sporty, high achieving, charming – in short, they’re the perfect family.
Perfect, that is, if you ignore the aforementioned divorces, Harris’s boiling temper, Tipper’s fragile health, the increasing tensions among Harris’s daughters about how his estate will eventually be parceled out, and the growing unease of the “Liars” – the name given to themselves by the three eldest grandchildren, along with their friend Gat – with the SInclairs’ patterns of behavior and way of life.
The Sinclairs are very good at ignoring these things. As Penny, Cadence’s mother, puts it: “Silence is a protective coating over pain.”
Gat, however, isn’t in the habit of ignoring uncomfortable truths. Gat is the nephew of Ed, Carrie’s boyfriend. Ed is Indian, and Harris Sinclair has made no bones about the fact he disapproves of his daughter dating someone who isn’t white. As an Indian teenage boy from a working-class background, Gat is emphatically an outsider. The most intellectually curious of the Liars, he feels shut off from the glittering academic, professional, and social opportunities that await Cadence, Johnny, and Mirren. He’s sometimes appalled by the Sinclairs’ blatant displays of wealth and privilege. And he doesn’t – or won’t – understand the polite rules that govern all the Sinclairs’ interactions. He brings up politics at the dinner table. He talks about things the rest of the family would prefer to keep hush-hush – like divorce and death. Most unforgivable of all? Gat falls in love with Cadence, and she falls in love with him.
Harris loves all his grandchildren but Cady is his golden child. She’s the eldest of the grandchildren. She will, as he frequently reminds her, stand to inherit the bulk of the Sinclair fortune. Her feelings for Gat jeopardize all of this. What’s more, she doesn’t care.
ANALYSIS
The story of the Sinclair family is ultimately a story about inheritance and legacy. The Sinclairs are extremely wealthy and the older generations of Sinclairs are preoccupied with safeguarding this accumulation of wealth, assets, and valuable objects. As Cadence puts it, the philosophy of her mother, aunts, and grandparents seems to be: “whoever dies with the most stuff wins.”
But while the older Sinclairs see their estate and inheritance in material terms, the story is really about what else is handed down from generation to generation: the beliefs, behaviors, and secrets that can be safeguarded within the family unit and passed down generational lines.
So what is the real Sinclair legacy? The Sinclairs place self-interest ahead of kindness; they guard their wealth rather than sharing it; they’re more concerned with maintaining a fairy-tale facade in public than addressing private pain and trauma.
But there’s more to the fairy-tale Sinclairs than their painstakingly crafted image of a close-knit, high-achieving, and perfectly functional family. In fact, at interludes throughout the book Cadence writes fairy-tale versions of her family’s story, featuring a King and his three beautiful daughters. The endings of these tales turn increasingly bitter and violent.
Cadence knows her relationship with Gat might see her disinherited. But the more she learns of the real Sinclair family legacy, the less she wants any part of it.
Trauma expresses itself in a multitude of ways.
The action of We Were Liars takes place over three consecutive summers. Summer 15, when Cadence and the other liars are 15, Summer 16, and Summer 17. The Sinclairs summer every year on their private island, Beechwood, off the Massachusetts coast and a stone’s throw from Martha’s Vineyard. There are four mansions on the island – Clairmont, home to Harris and Tipper; Red Gate, home to Carrie’s family including Gat, who joins his uncle Ed every summer; Cuddledown, home to Bess and her four children; and Windemere, home to Penny and Cadence.
Summer 15 starts off like all the rest. Long, lazy lunches – all prepared by the staff, naturally; sunbathing and kayaking with the Liars; trading books and meaningful glances with Gat who, even though he has a girlfriend back at his home in New York, is irresistibly drawn to Cadence.
But things start to go wrong. And the summer idyll comes to an abrupt end when Cadence wakes up in hospital. Her arms and feet are wrapped in heavy bandages. Her head throbs with pain. And she can remember very little of what happened before her accident. She tries to piece together what has happened. She remembers going night-swimming at the beach near Clairmont, alone. She doesn’t know why the other Liars didn’t go with her – that was the kind of adventure they would usually all embark on together. She does know that her mother found her on the beach, curled in a ball and shivering. She surmises she must have badly injured her head.
After the accident, Cadence asks her mother to explain to her, in detail, what happened. Penny does. Cadence can’t remember any of her mother’s explanation. The next day, she asks her mother to explain again. Still she retains no memory of her mother’s explanation. Eventually, she stops asking. The doctors believe the severity of Cadence’s head injury – which leaves her in chronic pain and with a serious painkiller habit – and the overall trauma of the incident, have conspired to create a sort of black hole in her memory. With time, it’s believed, Cadence will be able to remember the incident for herself.
Cadence experiences a host of side effects from her injury: persistent migraines that often leave her unable to perform even minor tasks, waves of debilitating nausea, and the aforementioned episodic memory loss. But the most devastating side effect is social and emotional, not physical – in the wake of her accident, the other Liars cut off all communication with Cadence. Her increasingly desperate texts and emails to them go unanswered. What really happened the night she was discovered catatonic on the beach? And why has it caused the Liars to cut all contact with her? Cadence spends much of the story trying to find out.
ANALYSIS
Trauma, and the way it continues to reverberate across the lives of those who experience it, is one of the central motifs of We Were Liars. In particular, the novel is concerned with what happens when trauma is repressed, unacknowledged, and – in the case of Cadence’s terrible accident – unable to be acknowledged.
In a skewed mirroring of her family’s preference for silence in the face of anything painful, shameful, or uncomfortable, Cadence is quite literally unable to articulate her trauma, because she can’t remember it. Instead, her trauma is physically embodied, written into the litany of painful, uncomfortable, and unrelenting symptoms that she suffers after her accident. The prolonged pain and suffering Cadence experiences after her accident neatly illustrate the book’s broader message about the negative impact of refusing to express painful feelings or acknowledge painful incidents.
Love and friendship are worth more than money.
After the catastrophic events of Summer 15, Cadence spends Summer 16 traveling around Europe with her Dad. She sends postcards and emails to the Liars detailing her adventures – eating snails in Barcelona, visiting the statue of David in Florence. She doesn’t tell them she spent most of her holiday lying with her cheeks pressed to the tile of various hotel bathroom floors.
But, for Summer 17, Cadence returns to Beechwood. A number of things have changed. In the wake of his wife Tipper’s death, Harris Sinclair is confused and erratic. He frequently mistakes Cadence for Mirren. Bessie and her children are staying with Harris instead of at Bessie’s house, Cuddledown. The aunts, who were at each other’s throats in Summer 15, are much gentler with each other now. The biggest change of all? Clairmont, Harris and Tipper’s stately mansion, has been demolished. New Clairmont, an austere modern house, stands in its place.
One thing hasn’t changed: the Liars are all on Beechwood, though they’ve all chosen to stay in the otherwise empty Cuddledown. Cadence is still too ill to stay with them, but she visits every day. And she’s thrilled to find that she and the Liars fall easily back into their old rhythms. She picks up the thread of her friendship with Johnny and Mirren and quickly rekindles her romance with Gat.
But somehow, Cadence and the Liars are never quite able to recapture the idyllic atmosphere of previous summers. Cadence asks the others over and over to tell her what happened in Summer 15. They refuse. She asks why they stopped speaking to her. They can’t seem to find a satisfactory answer.
When Cadence complains to Gat about her injury or her personal problems, he often reacts in anger. Finally, he snaps and tells her to stop looking for sympathy from him when she has more opportunities and privileges than he’ll ever have. When Cadence tries to vent about Gat to Mirren, she’s met with a similar response. Mirren points out that she’s never had a boyfriend, so she hardly appreciates Cadence whining about hers. Johnny, meanwhile, withdraws from the world, spending whole days inside watching television and eating junk food.
In fact, all the Liars, apart from Cadence, seem to be retreating from the world. They stay in Cuddledown, which grows increasingly messy, and refuse to join the rest of the family at New Clairmont. Some days they refuse to see Cadence, too – they come up with excuses not to see her which are later revealed to be lies.
Strangest of all, all three of them are suffering from a mysterious illness, which grows more and more debilitating as the summer wears on.
ANALYSIS
While We Were Liars focuses on intergenerational legacies and traumas, it’s also concerned with the adolescent friendship and romances of the younger generation of Sinclairs – the Liars. The story deals with heavy themes but the friendship between the Liars feels frank, fresh, and humorous. Cadence, Gat, Johnny, and Mirren are captured on the cusp of adulthood and they’re concerned both with adult issues – they talk about politics, race, and class – and preoccupied with more youthful pursuits, like cycling to the donut shop, scribbling on each other’s limbs in permanent marker, and imagining their future weddings and funerals.
Gat and Cadence’s romance, while troubled, is swoon-worthy from the start. Early in the story, Cadence is looking at Gat while he reads in a hammock. She observes, simply, “He felt like he was mine. Like he was my particular person.” Their relationship doesn’t just consist of kisses and midnight ocean swims, though there are plenty of both – Cadence’s blithe privilege irritates Gat and he struggles to open her eyes to racism and other forms of structural oppression.
The story achieves a delicate balance in portraying the intensity, hilarity, carefreeness, and seriousness of adolescent relationships, whether platonic or romantic. The relationship between the four Liars is the heart of the book.
The truth is revealed.
As the summer wears on, memories of Summer 15 come back to Cadence in flashes. She begins to write down what she remembers, to piece together the events leading up to her head injury.
Here’s what she remembers:
Her aunts, always scheming and strategic when it came to the matter of their father’s will, were acting even more passive-aggressive and manipulative than normal. Harris’s weakening health and failing memory have compelled his daughters to act quickly to secure their share of his massive estate. The aunts resort to using their children as pawns, sending them to Harris with seemingly innocuous questions about their college prospects, or with instructions to tell their grandfather how much they love the fine art in his collection or his stately home in Boston. The Liars are disgusted by their mothers and refuse to play their games.
Gat, meanwhile, after the romantic sparks of Summer 14, was reserved and standoffish. He admits that he feels guilty fooling around with Cadence when he has a girlfriend, Renate, back home. Cadence asks why she can’t be his girlfriend – after all, Gat has admitted that he loves her in a deeper, truer way than he loves Renate. But Gat is convinced there’s no future for him with Cadence. Their backgrounds are simply too different. The Sinclairs would never accept him.
And it turns out Gat’s not completely wrong – Cadence’s mother implies that her relationship with Gat is jeopardizing Cadence’s inheritance. Cadence is furious and heartbroken.
The Liars are appalled at the behavior of the older Sinclairs. So they come up with a plan.
When Cadence remembers all of this, she goes to the Liars and asks them to confirm her recollection of events. They tell her she’s correct.
After a summer of increasing tensions, squabbling, and unchecked privilege, the Liars decided the Sinclair family needed to be cleansed of its tainted legacy. They’d wait until everyone else had left Beechwood for an off-island social event. Then they’d douse Clairmont with petrol – each of the four Liars would be responsible for one of the home’s four levels – then they’d each strike a match and watch the family seat burn.
But Cadence doesn’t remember the most harrowing part until later. The Liars carried out their plan – but it went wrong. They were supposed to meet in the Boathouse, where they’d all watch Clairmont go up in flames. But before they doused the house in petrol, they helped themselves to wine from the cellars. They were drunk and confused as they roamed through the house with petrol cans. And after Cadence lit the fire, left the house, and headed through the garden to the boathouse, it became clear that the rest of the Liars were still inside. She battled back through the blazing house but the smoke and flames were already too thick. Badly burned, she ran out of the house, and onto the beach, It was there that her mother found her.
Now, in Summer 16, the Liars are ghosts, or figments of Cadence’s troubled imagination. The longer they stay at Cuddledown, the sicker they become. And now that Cadence has finally faced her trauma head-on, it’s time for them to leave. One by one they say goodbye to Cadence, then swim out into the sea, past the cove where they all used to swim together until they disappear over the horizon and leave Cadence standing on the sand alone.
ANALYSIS
In the opening lines of her story, Cadence assures the reader that everyone in the Sinclair family is beautiful; no one is a criminal, an addict, or a failure. It soon becomes clear – if the title, We Were Liars and the fact that Cadence’s close-knit group of friends choose to call themselves the Liars doesn’t already make it plain – that Cadence’s narration may not be entirely truthful or reliable.
The fact that Cadence can’t remember the central events of the story for much of the book makes her an inherently untrustworthy narrator. But memory, its fallibility and the role it plays in shaping stories, is a motif developed throughout the book. Harris’s memory, too, is failing; after the fire, all the Sinclairs must decide how much, and in what way, they want to remember the fire and its aftermath.
In fact, even the name Cadence gestures to the partial, subjective, and unreliable nature of Cadence’s narration – a cadence can, of course, denote an inflection or emphasis, especially in spoken language; an inflection or emphasis which might well change the meaning of a story. Cadence isn’t only obsessed with recovering her own story, but preoccupied with the stories the Sinclairs have told themselves for generations – and how damaging these stories and half-truths have ultimately proved for the whole family.
Final Summary
After a head injury, Cadence Sinclair can’t remember the tragic fire that shook her family and burnt her grandfather’s home to the ground. Over the course of three summers, she fills in the backstory and pieces together the aftermath of the fire, which she set, along with the Liars – her cousins Johnny and Mirren and boyfriend Gat – as an expression of their disgust at the Sinclairs’ extreme privilege. A twist ending reveals that, while Cadence believes she’s spent three summers with the Liars, the other three died in the fire, and for their last summer together, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat were ghosts or products of Cadence’s imagination.