Back when We Were Liars Season 1 first came out, author E. Lockhart teased her upcoming new novel, set in the world of the Sinclair family near Beechwood Island, and now the standalone novel has arrived.
As Lockhart told Deadline this past summer, We Fell Apart takes place across the water from Beechwood Island, where We Were Liars and its prequel Family of Liars are set, between generations. Returning to the world of We Were Liars for the TV show influenced Lockhart’s decision to make connections to that story in We Fell Apart.
“I was working on this book during pre-production for the We Were Liars TV show. I was an executive producer on that show. I wrote one episode, the finale, and I was part of the casting process and the location scouting process that was going on during pre-production,” she told Deadline. “[It] was taking a lot of my week, every week. My imagination was really in that We Were Liars world. I just kept finding connection points, where I ended up wanting to bring an element of We Were Liars into We Fell Apart.”
Set during the Summer 15 of Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind), Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), Johnny (Joseph Zada) and Mirren (Esther McGregor), We Fell Apart stars an entirely different cast of characters who live near Hidden Beach. Lockhart had previously told Deadline about visiting the property on Martha’s Vineyard — the unfinished summer retreat of a brutalist architect that had fallen into disrepair after his death — that would serve as inspiration for the setting of her new novel.
“I got the idea to write a story set in a highly-fictionalized version of this property, and I had an idea about this young woman and the father that she’d never met. She comes to this house to visit him, and he’s not there,” the author expounded. “She gets sucked into this world of three teenage boys who are living in this house [and] the stepmother while she’s trying to solve the mystery of where her father is. So all of that was in place, and I was writing this book, and I knew that that the setting of We Were Liars was just across the water, just over there.
Prime Video’s We Were Liars has since been renewed for a second season, and Lockhart teased that Season 2 will incorporate story threads from her prequel novel Family of Liars in addition to new stories for We Were Liars characters. We Fell Apart contains nods and references to both books. Lockhart also revealed that the We Were Liars showrunners received early copies of We Fell Apart in case they later want to weave in that storyline.
“I ended up having my characters trespass over on Beechwood Island and run around in the middle of the night on this island. I wanted to write all the rumors that people on the island of Martha’s Vineyard are saying about the Sinclair family over on Beechwood Island,” Lockhart added. “I just started bringing the worlds together, until I was like, ‘Oh, I see.’ This is really a book that is set in the same universe, even though it’s a standalone story.”
In the below interview, Lockhart dives further into differentiating the stories, connecting the dots with very specific references to both books set on Beechwood Island, and where the hope lies in her newest novel, now out in bookstores.
DEADLINE: I love that you brought in painting as a connection as well as the elements of videogame design. How did you want to establish that as your main character’s passion?
LOCKHART: Matilda is an aspiring video game designer and a gamer, and in both We Were Liars and Family of Liars, the main characters use fairy tales to speak the unspeakable truths of their family, right? So I was looking for a way to do that would feel fresh and energized and different, and to have my central heroine be a storyteller of a different stripe. I don’t play a ton of video games, but the ones I play, I love pretty hard. And one of my kids is a pretty intense game,r or at least has had phases of being an intense gamer. So I started trying my hand at that, and also around that period, I read Gabrielle Zevin’s incredible novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. That book which is being made into a film, is about game designers, but she really takes you, with all of her novelist’s skill, into the games. In that book, you’ll be inside a game for sometimes, chapter upon chapter and sometimes much shorter. In We Fell Apart, the video game sections are much shorter, but I still wanted to use them to show you something about the mysteries of the novel, but in a sideways way.
DEADLINE: The Narnia references in We Fell Apart are very fairytale-esque. The Family of Liars prequel book had a few of those. Can you talk more about that connection?
LOCKHART: There are a couple short Narnia references in Family of Liars, which is the second book in this universe. Basically, what you learn in Family of Liars, and this is not a spoiler, is just that Harris’s brother Dean named his dogs and his house after Narnia characters. And so when you start seeing that some things are also named after Narnia [in We Fell Apart] — there’s a boat named after a Narnian boat, there’s a dog named after a Narnian Marshwiggle — and if you’ve read Family of Liars, you might start to wonder about that.
I also really love the section of C.S. Lewis’ book [The Voyage of the Dawn Treader] where Eustace Scrubb turns into a dragon. To me, the boy inside the dragon who wants to get out of the dragon skin and cannot figure out how to get out — that is a really powerful image. I was interested in having a number of characters who, in some way, are [or] have been stuck inside a skin that doesn’t feel like the right skin, and need to come out, to separate from the the skin that is entrapping them. The theme of escape from a donkey, skin, from a dragon skin, from a castle, from a family, is something that recurs over and over, throughout We Fell Apart.
DEADLINE: The mystery of the book is Matilda meeting her father. How did you want to paint him through the lenses of other people’s visions of him before she meets him?
LOCKHART: Matilda’s father is Kingsley Cello. He is a famous, reclusive artist who paints large scale, thrilling paintings of classical and fairytale subjects, literary subjects. One of the main ways that you meet Kingsley, before you really meet him in the story, is through his art. Kingsley is telling the story of his own origin and his own wounds in his paintings. So hopefully, on the reread, my readers will see in those painting descriptions, much more than they see in the first read-through.
DEADLINE: Well that’s all I had unless you wanted to say anything else about We Fell Apart?
LOCKHART: I would add, well, it’s my most romantic book, I think. In We Were Liars and Family of Liars, there are romantic storylines that don’t end happily. In We Fell Apart, I don’t mind the spoiler — it’s a romantic book with a happy ending to the romance. It does have a big plot twist. It should give you a nice, big cry, but the romance is just a beautiful love story. That’s not the thing I’m trying to rip apart in this book. I was feeling like I wanted something to feel very genuinely hopeful and even joyful at the end, despite all the stuff that happens. After two books where maybe that’s not the case, I wanted to give that to my readers, that feeling of hope at the end, and of good things happening to good people.
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The post How ‘We Were Liars’ Author E. Lockhart Made “Connection Points” To Sinclair Family In New Novel ‘We Fell Apart’ appeared first on Deadline.
