payment page
We Were Liars relies on a simple pattern in which the narrator, Cadence Sinclair, tells a lie and then tells the truth as she seeks to recover her memory, even as she tries to come to terms with the legacy of her family and her place in it. Narratively, this pattern results in alternating passages of prose and verse in which one set embodies the lies and the other speaks the truth. The pattern is also woven through the changing temporal scenarios of the book’s chapters. Cadence uses cues such as “summer eight” to orient the reader within her journey. She also uses descriptions as stand-ins for character names, like “strong coffee and ambition” for Gat, mimicking the ways that sights, sounds, and smells can summon memories in our brains. Sometimes Cadence uses what seems to be hyperbolic language to describe her pain, and she intersperses her memory recall with fairytales that both rely on well-known patterns and are products of her own imagination. All of these strategies together create feelings of disorientation and delay the novel’s stated goal of recovering Cadence’s memory of what happened in summer fifteen, the year she underwent a debilitating accident, resulting in feelings of frustration and mounting tension.
Cadence’s accident, her subsequent unexplained mental trauma, and her attempts to remember what happened thus structure the novel in ways that mirror her mental confusion. She works hard to convince the reader, and perhaps herself, that her mother Penny is hiding the truth from Cadence, and that her grandfather Harris initiated and encouraged the family conflict that prevents Cadence from achieving a full recovery. But it is eventually revealed that Cadence is the only one who will be able to tell herself the truth. Although she locates her pivotal moment in summer fifteen at the time of the accident, her voyage begins chronologically and emotionally much earlier, in summer eight when her father leaves, forcing her to retreat to Beechwood Island and the Liars. The loss of her father’s presence distorts her understanding of her mother, her family, and her summer retreat. She begins to see the island as the only place in her life where she lives a truly real life or has meaningful relationships. In fact, Beechwood Island is an isolated bit of land upon which Harris has built an exclusively family retreat. Thus, while Cadence claims to confront the problematic history of the Sinclair family, she does so from safely within its stronghold.
Throughout the novel, Cadence insists that she wants to know what happened. However, the novel’s structure undermines her stated goal, with the primary impediment being her trauma. She can’t remember because she doesn’t want to remember. Doing so requires that she take responsibility for the death of those who were dearest to her heart. And while Cadence is quite good at holding others responsible, she doesn’t demonstrate that same ability for herself. Cadence is critical of Penny and Harris. She accuses both of them of accumulating possessions for the sake of ownership, as it grants them status. She is specifically angry at Harris for using love to manipulate others. But Cadence refuses to acknowledge that in her own quest for Gat’s love, she’s been happy to manipulate Penny, her father, and Harris to make the trip to Beechwood Island in summer seventeen. She is also unable to acknowledge the ways that their possessions grant her status, such as the ability to travel to Europe or attend Harvard. The still-adolescent Cadence ignores Penny’s accusations in these regards, but seems more willing to hear the Liars when they confront Cadence with her flaws.
Cadence also claims to want love, Gat, and a pain-free life. Her journey toward health and healing is sometimes presented as a quest for one or more of these goals, even if they may be unrealistic. No life is pain free, and her pain in particular is self-inflicted. The doctors can find no reason for her brain trauma or her memory loss, and Penny won’t answer Cadence’s questions because of her inability to process the information. Pain is an inescapable facet of life, and for most of the novel Cadence is unprepared to accept that fact. As for Gat, Cadence knows him only as he exists on Beechwood Island. She knows nothing of his life in New York City, the other girls in which he is interested, or the prejudice he faces, nor does she demonstrate much interest in these. She only wants “this” and “here,” regardless of the fact that Gat might have other goals or desires. While love is certainly a laudable and universal goal, Cadence’s understanding of it is necessarily immature and overwhelming. She considers love an all-consuming focus, a kind of possession that mirrors the consumption she finds fault in her family for pursing.
Ultimately, her desires reveal and conflict with her nature as a Sinclair, which she must both refute and accept. To become whole, with all of her memories intact, Cadence must recognize that she has within herself all of the worst Sinclair qualities. She is a liar. She can be selfish. She revels in the status that ownership, possessions, and wealth bestow upon her. She despises pain and desires for to have no part of her life experience, like anyone else. These are qualities of the privileged, the wealthy, and the powerful. However, to deny these qualities in herself would be to deny her essential nature. She is a Sinclair, and any attempt to deny it is a form of self-negation. Still, she need not be bound to a predetermined or a fairytale version of herself. Ultimately, Cadence acknowledges that she wrought the same kind of destruction on the family in which Harris and the aunts engaged. Cadence took their conflict to its terrible, logical conclusion. Now, the best she can do is work to transcend her family’s legacy through her own action and try to be kinder than she has been.
