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WELCOME TO THE beautiful Sinclair family.
No one is a criminal.
No one is an addict.
No one is a failure.
The novel’s opening lines set the stage for one of its primary themes, the pervasiveness of lies. It quickly becomes obvious that, despite the narrator’s insistence, the Sinclair family has failures, addicts, and even criminals. However, the family is defined by its public status, the image that people have of them. Outward appearance is vital to the Sinclair family. They will go to great lengths to ensure that appearances are maintained, no matter how many lies must be told. Eventually, they come to be defined by the lies themselves, so what Cadence says is eerily true. In the Sinclair family, “no one is…” The lies both determine and undermine the family’s very existence.
Don’t cause distress, she said. Don’t remind people of a loss. ‘Do you understand, Cady? Silence is a protective coating over pain.’
These words, spoken in Chapter 11 by Penny, summarize the novel’s main conflict. Cadence and the Liars are, at least among themselves, relatively honest. They talk about their hopes and dreams as well as the state of the world and their family’s place in it. But in the presence of the aunts and Harris, they toe the family line, except for Gat. By mutual consensus, the family never talks about the people who have left. This includes Gran, who died, and William, Sam, and Brody, the estranged husbands. Only Gat reminisces about the ways Gran made their world better or casually uses the name of one of the husbands, at which the family recoils. Cadence might resent this fact of Sinclair family life, but she lives within it. As a narrator, however, she struggles with her familial duty to remain silent as she balances it against her personal obligation to recover the painful experiences that have caused her to lose her memory. She thus exists in a situation where to become herself, she must deny an essential part of herself, which is her Sinclair-ness. It’s an impossible situation, and one of the main reasons that she teeters so long between forgetting and remembering.
I reached out and touched his arm again. He didn’t pull away. ‘When we say Shut up, Gat, that isn’t what we mean at all.’
‘No?’
‘What we mean is, we love you. You remind us that we’re selfish bastards. You’re not one of us, that way.’
Cadence’s mother tried to teach her that not only silence but also lies could be useful, to which Cadence responded obediently although she felt anger and resentment. Additionally, Cadence understands that words don’t always mean what they seem to mean. In one sense, this means that we shouldn’t always take what people say at face value. As she tells Gat, layers of meaning can underlie the simplest of phrases, and we should learn to listen with our hearts instead of our ears. In another sense, though, words can be manipulated for the speaker’s benefit. Cadence loves Gat, even as she reminds him that he’s an outsider. In her relationship with Gat, Cadence’s lies to herself are as integral to the truth they speak to each other.
HERE IS THE truth about the Beautiful Sinclair Family. At least, the truth as Granddad knows it. The truth he was careful to keep out of all newspapers.
In Chapter 80, Cadence describes the version of the truth that Harris knows and that defines “the Beautiful Sinclair Family.” Cadence in Chapter 80 is careful, as she has been over the course of the book, to remind the reader that no single version of the truth exists. This version is uniquely problematic because it belongs to Harris, who is suffering from memory problems of his own. Since the death of his wife, his mental health has been declining, and after Cadence’s accident, he confuses her with Mirren and is increasingly irritable. Still, he wields power. Harris Sinclair can dictate which news is published and which is withheld, thereby manipulating the truth to which the public has access. Cadence’s capitalized reference to the family as “Beautiful” serves as part of this web of truths/untruths. The capital letters symbolize the family’s power and status in New England. The adjective "Beautiful" represents what people see when they look at the family and references the many beautiful objects they have made it their business to collect. But Cadence uses the phrase ironically, ultimately highlighting its falseness.
