Summary
Narrated in the first-person perspective by the novel’s protagonist, Cadence Sinclair Eastman, We Were Liars opens with Cadence introducing her family to the reader. The Sinclair family members are beautiful, rich, athletic, and tall. They spend summers on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. They support the Democrats. No one is a criminal, addict, or failure. Cadence says it doesn’t matter if money is running out, divorce is destroying lives, or pill bottles are clustering on the bedside table—because they are Sinclairs, and no one is needy or wrong. Cadence is nearly eighteen and lives in a grand house with her mother in Vermont. She has suffered from migraines since an accident several years ago.
The summer Cadence is fifteen, before the accident, her father leaves Cadence’s mother for another woman. He says he can’t try to be a Sinclair any longer. To watch him drive off makes Cadence feel like he has shot her in the chest. Mummy snaps at her to get a hold of herself. They throw away any trace of his existence in the house and hire decorators. They then pack bags to spend the summer at Beechwood Island. Cadence comments on how her grandfather Harris came into his money after going to Harvard. He kept his wife, Tipper, in the kitchen and garden, or showed her off in pearls and on sailboats. His daughters Penny, Carrie, and Bess were tall, merry, rich princesses. Each was given their own house on the island: Windemere for Penny, Red Gate for Carrie, and Cuddledown for Bess. As the eldest grandchild, Cadence is the likely heiress of the island.
Every summer Cadence lives on the island and spends her time with the cousins around her age, Johnny and Mirren. There is also Gat Patil, who started coming to the island when they were eight. Gat is Ed’s nephew. Ed is Carrie’s partner. Carrie’s husband left her when she was pregnant with Johnny’s brother, Will. Cadence recalls how her very white grandparents were surprised to learn Ed is Indian the day he stepped off the boat with Carrie. Cadence stared at Gat, who seemed spring-loaded with energy. She “could have looked at him forever.” From then on, Gat came every summer. He, Johnny, Mirren, and Cadence became known to the adults as the Liars.
During summer fourteen, Gat and Cadence take out the small motorboat alone. They jump in the water, then scramble back into the boat while talking about sharks. While huddled under a fleece blanket, Gat asks when Cadence got so pretty. They spend more time together. One day Cadence looks at him in a hammock and he seems like he is her “particular person.” She joins him in the hammock and they write each other’s names on the backs of their hands.
Cadence arrives a week late for summer fifteen because she and her mother are busy dealing with the house after Cadence’s father left. When she sees Gat in the kitchen, with the sunlight hitting him, waiting with a rose he’d picked and dried for her, Cadence realizes she loves him. He doesn’t notice her watching. Gat then puts the rose in a stamped and return-addressed envelope. Cadence realizes the flower isn’t for her. She goes out under a darkening sky and tears every rose off a bush, throwing the flowers into the angry sea.
Cadence learns from Johnny that evening about Raquel, Gat’s New York girlfriend. Cadence cries and bites her fingers and shivers that night, but for the rest of the summer acts normal, holding her square chin high. One night they have a bonfire by the water. Gat talks about how it is absurd to say one individual owns an island, and that when he was volunteering in India that year, he was building toilets for people who had nowhere to go to the bathroom. He says Beechwood gives them a warped idea of how the world is. The cousins and Cadence tell him to shut up. He goes into the cold water. Seeing that she is going to lose him to Raquel, Cadence follows in her dress and apologizes. She says that when they tell him to shut up, they are saying they love him. They touch each other’s hands for the first time that summer. Johnny and Mirren join them, crashing into the water.
That night, after midnight, Gat calls for Cadence to come outside. He is lying with all five golden retrievers on the wooden walkway. She lies beside him. He asks to hold her hand. Gat says he doesn’t believe in God since seeing the poverty in India, and then seeing anew the poverty in New York. He says he doesn’t know how to be a good person if he doesn’t believe anymore. He gives her his jacket when he notices she is cold. She wants to kiss him but doesn’t, thinking he might love Raquel. The next morning, Cadence goes through her father’s things in the attic at her mother’s request. Gat accompanies. While sorting books by color, Gat gets to his knees and tells Cadence he loves her. He strokes her hair. She leans in to kiss him. The kiss is “electric and soft, and tentative and certain, terrifying and exactly right.” She feels the love rush between them.
Cadence’s granddad walks in on them, commenting on how he is interrupting. Gat is awkward. He goes down the stairs. Cadence’s grandfather begins reminiscing about the first baseball game he brought her to. She knows he wants her to complete the story, telling it back to him, but she is distracted by thoughts of what will happen with Gat, and whether he’ll break up with Raquel. Later, Cadence finds Gat looking out at the ocean. She runs up and kisses him again. His lips are salty.
Cadence comments on how the house is quiet now that granny Tipper is dead. One day, Cadence sobs intensely while touching the fabrics in Tipper’s craft room. Her mother finds her and tells her to breathe and sit up. She tells Cadence it’s important not to cause distress and remind people of loss. She says, “Do you understand, Cady? Silence is a protective coating over pain.” Cadence obeys her mother’s wishes, erasing Tipper from memory. Gat and Cadence continue to touch each other and steal kisses in secret.
One July night, Cadence goes swimming alone. She isn’t sure what happens, but after going under the water she washes up on shore, hypothermic. Her mother finds her and seeks medical attention for Cadence back in Vermont. Gat never calls or writes. Cadence concludes it was only a summer fling, and he must love Raquel. The pain in Cadence’s neck and head stretches for weeks. She throws up and blacks out all the time. Eventually, she is diagnosed with post-traumatic headaches: migraines caused by brain injury. The migraines continue the next summer as Cadence visits her father in Europe instead of returning to Beechwood, where her grandfather is redoing the Claremont house. Cadence is given lots of medication for the pain. She misses Johnny and Mirren, who she texts, calls, and emails, with no reply. She is not entirely surprised.
Analysis
In the opening chapter of We Were Liars, Cadence presents facts about the Sinclair family in a blatantly ironic tone, hinting that she means the opposite of what she is saying. With this tone, Cadence signals to the reader that her family presents itself to the world as perfect to maintain the dignity of their elevated social position. But in the novel we are about to read, Cadence will steadily peel away that veneer of perfection to reveal the ugly truth her family seeks to cover up.
Moving back in time to when she is fifteen, Cadence reveals the first of what will be many unpleasant episodes in her personal history. Upon watching her father reject the Sinclair family and abandon her mother, Cadence’s sense of grief is so strong that she employs the graphic metaphor of being shot in the chest by her father. Her mother, however, has many decades of experience repressing emotions in order to save face. Instead of breaking down herself, Penny reprimands her daughter for showing vulnerability. With this scene, Lockhart introduces the major themes of grief, trauma, manipulation, and emotional repression.
The theme of privilege arises with Cadence’s details about Beechwood, the private island off Massachusetts where she spends her summers with her extended family. Based on the information provided, it is likely that the Sinclairs are among the wealthiest families in the United States. But to Cadence, Beechwood is simply a magical place she gets to visit every year as she grows up; she is blind to the extreme luxury she enjoys.
Over time, Cadence falls in love with Gat, the nephew of her aunt’s partner. The same summer her father leaves her mother, Cadence arrives late to Beechwood to find that Gat has collected and dried beach roses. The sight of him makes her heart swell with affection, but in an instance of dramatic irony in which Gat doesn’t know Cadence is watching him, Cadence discovers he is sending the roses to someone else: his girlfriend in New York. Following her mother’s lead, Cadence tries to repress her emotional pain, just as she sought to ignore the grief of her father leaving.
The themes of grief and denial arise again when Cadence goes to her dead grandmother’s sewing room and feels a sudden swell of emotion. In a metaphor in which she compares her release of tears to becoming a puddle, Cadence finds a healthy means of expressing the sorrow she feels for not just her grandmother’s absence but also her father’s. However, Penny turns up to once again scold her daughter for showing her emotions, calling silence a “protective coating over pain.” Again, Cadence obeys her mother and attempts to erase her grandmother from memory, just as she had to do with her father.
While summer fifteen begins to go Cadence’s way with reciprocated affection from Gat, the summer comes to a dramatic and confusing end when Cadence washes up on shore, having become hypothermic while swimming alone. The fallout of her accident involves horrific migraines that require medication with Percocet. Disappointingly, none of the Liars get in touch with Cadence to see how she is doing—a detail explained only much later, with the hindsight knowledge that Johnny, Mirren, and Gat have died.
