We Were Liars

“Then he pulled a handgun and shot me in the chest.”

One of the more interesting sentences in the novel, this phrasing depicts Cady's suffering over the loss of her father through the metaphor of murder. She perceives his departure as harming her in the same way a gunshot might. This sentence may also be viewed as foreshadowing for the accidental murders of the Liars that follow.

“He married Tipper and kept her in the kitchen and the garden. He put her on display in pearls and on sailboats. She seemed to enjoy it.” 

The gender relations in Cady's grandparents' world are very different from the more egalitarian ones she grow up with. Her grandmother, Tipper, is a "trophy wife," a beautiful woman a wealthy man marries and shows off to the world. She enjoys being put on display, and in the descriptions in these sentences, she’s rendered virtually inanimate.  

"Johnny is bounce, effort, and snark." 

Cady has a gift for characterization. In this sentence, she summarizes her cousin, Johnny, using just three words. She captures his energetic wildness. That he is a bit unruly is rendered in the word "snark.”

“Mirren is sugar, curiosity, and rain.” 

Cady lets us see with just three words that Mirren is very different from Johnny. She is sweeter (sugar); she is more mindful and less energetic (curiosity); and he is associated metaphorically with the melting of emotional boundaries (rain). She is an empathetic person who feels for others and suffers deep feelings herself.

“Gat seemed spring-loaded. Like he was searching for something. He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.” 

Gat is a very distinct character, and Cady has to come up with more words for him than the standard three she offers to describe the other Liars. She sees Gat as someone who reaches beyond himself, but he also has a strong center. The metaphor "spring-loaded" captures this dual quality of his being.

“You remind us that we're selfish bastards.” 

Gat has criticized property ownership in front of young people whose family owns a lot of property. Johnny is critical of him, and Mirren tells him to shut up. Hurt, Gat flees to the water, where Cady consoles him with this sentence. The quote illustrates Cady’s care for Gat and shows that both are critical of the Sinclair family.

“This trip to India, the poverty. No god I can imagine would let that happen […] I just—I can't think that anyone's watching over those people. Which means no one is watching over me, either.” 

Gat is a key character in the novel. Cady loves him and sympathizes with him, and these feelings inspire her to come to hate her family's wealth. In this passage, Gat identifies with the poor of the world, which fuels his existential bent. Gat also becomes a symbol of the poverty on which Cady feels her family preys. These feelings will inspire her to commit arson and harm both her family and her friends.

“I knew the kind of answer Granddad wanted me to give. It was a request he made quite often.” 

Because the novel is a retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, Granddad, who represents Lear, is an important figure. Like Lear, he asks for expressions of love from his family, and he expects to be flattered by them.

“Every time Gat said these things, so casual so truthful, so oblivious—my veins opened. My wrists split. I bled down my palms.” 

If the Sinclair family survives by telling lies, Gat is the truth-teller from outside who disturbs their equanimity. That is one reason Cady loves him. From this passage, as well, we can predict why the loss of her friends will have such a traumatic effect on Cady. She feels things deeply, as the images of wounding and bleeding suggest.    

“Let me ask you this. Who killed the girls? The dragon? Or their father?” 

Two people are to blame for the death of the three Liars. Cady is the immediate cause because she inspires them to burn down Clairmont. It is her idea. But behind her is another cause—her grandfather. He created the world she wished to destroy, and he inspired his daughters to fight over the inheritance. It was that fighting, and the greed that lay under it, that made Cady act as she did.

“That woman buys things just to buy things.” 

We can understand why Cady suddenly wants to give away all of her belongings by comparing Cady to her mother. Penny, as Cady notices, buys things just for the sake of buying things. This is what is wrong with her family, according to Cady: they have too many possessions, and base their collective identity around their wealth. Further, they seem not to realize that their wealth is surrounded by poverty. Gat reminds them of this, but it is not until he and the others are killed that they are shocked out of their complacency.

“‘Be normal now,’ she whispers. 'Right now.’” 

Cady's mother tells her on several occasions to be normal. The word is like a talisman that, when waved, is supposed to make all the suffering of the world go away, so that the Sinclair family can maintain appearances. The most important appearance is that there is no trouble in the world. Their enjoyment of their wealth is premised on the assumption that it has no harmful effects, and that it addresses everyone's emotional and existential needs. Any sign of suffering would upset this shared delusion.

“You look like a dead vampire.” 

Other characters make us aware of Cady's suffering. She can describe her internal emotional states and her headaches, but another character who sees her from outside is required to illuminate just how much she really is suffering. In this remark, Bonnie describes Cady's appearance, and we get a better sense of the changes her pain has wrought on her. 

“I don't know what you're talking about.” 

Cady's aunt, Carrie, says this to her when Cady talks about Johnny as though he were still alive. It is one of several indicators the author throws in to alert readers to the fact that her story is a trick narrative. The reader is led to believe that Cady's delusion that the Liars are still alive is true. But she is also careful to let us know that they are not.

“You cutting us out, Dad? Mummy was drunk.” 

Granddad, in true King Lear fashion, toys with his daughters and makes them compete for his wealth. Cady's mother argues with her sister, Bess, regarding who is helping their father more. He seems to threaten to disinherit those who help him less.

“‘You feel like you know me, C, but you only know the me who comes here,’ he says. ‘It's—it's just not the whole picture. You don't know my bedroom with the window onto the airshaft […].’” 

Gat speaks to Cady here, and he reveals to her for the first time the pain he feels when he comes to Beechwood Island. He is poor, and Cady does not know this side of his life. She only sees the Gat who is part of the wealthy Sinclair family. 

“Now, at the breakfast table, watching him eat my toast, ‘Don't take no for an answer’ seemed like the attitude of a privileged guy who didn't care who got hurt, so long as his wife had the cute statues she wanted to display in her summerhouses.” 

As the novel nears its conclusion, Cady begins to observe her family more closely and to see it more critically. Here, she diagnoses her grandfather's way of uttering platitudes such as "Do not take no for an answer" that seem to indicate personal virtue. In reality, she is realizing, they are the smug pronouncements of a man with great wealth and enormous power in the world.

“Every now and then a bottle rolls off the roof and the glass smashes. In fact, there are shards and shards of splintered glass, sticky with lemonade, all over the porch. Flies buzz around, attracted by the sugar.” 

In this novel, incidental and seemingly marginal descriptive passages like this one are more important than they might be in other works of fiction. They point to the real world that Cady ignores as she pursues her fantasy of a reunion with the Liars. They are indicative of the reality she must ultimately come to terms with, if she is to recover and move on in her life.

“In Charmed Life, that book I gave Gat, there are parallel universes in which different events have happened to the same people. An alternate choice has been made, or an accident has turned out differently. Everyone has duplicates of themselves in these other worlds. Different selves with different lives, different luck. Variation.”

Here, the author gives us huge hint as to what is really going on in the novel. By this point, we believe in Cady's fantasy that the Liars are still alive, but with this descriptive passage, the author alerts to another possibility. The passage also has a thematic point. It is about chance and the way chance events can change everything in life. It was a matter of chance, of pure bad luck, that Cady lost her friends. Had she done things differently by a small degree, they might be alive.

“We burned not a home but a symbol.” 

Cady's decision to burn down Clairmont with her friends is not so much a statement against the house as it is against what the house represents. Clairmont represents the smugness, greed, unkindness, and wealth blindness of her family. She feels they are a false family that might become a real family if they woke up to how bad their collective behavior is. 

“‘Here are the pearl earrings Mother promised me.’ ‘The black pearls? She said I could have them.’” 

This is an example of the petty greed that drives Cady over the edge and makes her want to do something violent against her family as a form of protest. Aunt Bess and Cady's mother fight over jewelry left by their mother, Tipper. They are more focused on property ownership than they are on personal values, such as their love of their mother, or on more emotional issues, such as how much they miss her. To Cady, they have bad values and miss the important more valuable things in life, which, for her, are summed up in her love for Gat, which transcends issues of property. He is poor; she is rich; it does not matter, as far as she is concerned.

“I was supposed to make Granddad feel in control when his world was spinning because Gran had died. I was to beg him by praising him—never acknowledging the aggression behind his question […]‘It's too big for us,’ I told Granddad.” 

Cady rebels verbally before she rebels physically by burning down Clairmont with the Liars. In this passage, she is aware of what her role as subordinate is supposed to be in the family drama around her. However, she refuses this role. Like Cordelia in King Lear, she rebels with words by disagreeing with the family patriarch. Perhaps most importantly, she indicates she is not interested in property. In this manner, she has to a certain extent ceased being a Sinclair. She does so in order to force the Sinclairs to cease being their awful, unkind selves.

“What if we could somehow stop being the Beautiful Sinclair family and just be a family? What if we could stop being different colors, different backgrounds, and just be in love? What if we could force everyone to change?”

Cady has been changed by her relationship with Gat. She has ceased to be a classic Sinclair and has become sensitive, instead, to the fact that the world is made up of different kinds of people. It's unrealistic to expect that all should adhere to a standard of whiteness backed by wealth. Cady hopes now to force her family to change and to see things her way. She succeeds to a certain extent, but she also fails, of course, because her success costs her the Liars.