Family of Liars
Family of Liars
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E. Lockhart on Family of Liars
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A walk, a friend, and the terrible ideasFor years after ‘We Were Liars’ appeared in 2014, Lockhart had publicly ruled out a return to Beechwood Island, the invented private island at the center of the Sinclair family novels. Then, in the summer of 2020, TikTok users started posting about the book in volume, and sales climbed back onto the bestseller lists. What broke the logjam wasn’t a strategy session but a conversation on a Brooklyn sidewalk with her friend and fellow novelist Gayle Forman, who refused to accept that every idea Lockhart had was hopeless.
We were going for a walk, and Gayle said, ‘I don’t understand why you don’t want to write another book set on Beechwood Island.’ I explained that all my ideas were terrible. She said, ‘Well, tell me your terrible ideas.’ So, I did.
Each time Forman steered one of those ideas somewhere Lockhart didn’t want to go, Lockhart heard herself saying no. The realization that she kept correcting her friend meant she already had a story she simply hadn’t yet named.
The TikTok surge mattered to her for a reason that had nothing to do with chart positions. After years of ‘We Were Liars’ sitting quietly in the world, a new generation of readers was suddenly arriving, and that changed what felt possible.
It was so nice to have readers, and I got excited to see what else I could make set on that island, because I knew that people would read it.
Even with the motivation in place, a direct sequel remained out of reach. The first book ends in a way that forecloses most obvious continuations, and Lockhart knew that readers would arrive with precise expectations about what the experience should feel like. The solution she eventually landed on was to step back a full generation, to the summer of 1987 and Carrie Sinclair, the mother of Cady, the narrator of ‘We Were Liars.’
[paraphrased from audio] We Were Liars was known for making people cry and for having a big plot twist. And so, those are tall orders... I try to like break it down into much more small and nuanced kind of cognitive effects or pleasures that We Were Liars had delivered. Like, what were elements that I could repeat but change or deepen or shift, right? And I began sort of bit by bit to like find my way in to a way of delivering the same but still very different reading experience.
How she wrote it
Building the trap before readers arriveLockhart sold ‘Family of Liars’ on a pitch before a word of the novel existed, which is how she handles all her work now. That means the voice has to be alive on the page before the book is written, a problem she cannot solve from the outside.
[paraphrased from audio] I can’t kind of step back and coolly observe some novel that I haven’t even written yet. I have to like really try to find the storytelling voice in the pitch.
Readers coming to a prequel already know that the Sinclair family’s summer world will end badly. They also know, from ‘We Were Liars,’ that a shock is coming and will look for it in the second half. Lockhart decided to place it in the opening pages instead, using their anticipation as a tool against them.
I wanted to surprise my readers off the bat. I think people who have read We Were Liars are expecting a surprise, and they’re expecting it in the second half of the book, and I wanted to find a way to surprise them somewhere in the first couple pages.
Choosing the narrator required Lockhart to consider Penny, the most prominent of Cady’s aunts in ‘We Were Liars,’ before deciding she was too limited a perspective to carry a whole novel. She settled on Carrie, and her reasoning at a Books Are Magic event with author Victoria Lee went beyond personality fit. There was also a structural anchor: a brief late-night scene in ‘We Were Liars’ where Carrie is talking to Johnny gave her the frame narrative she needed.
[paraphrased from audio] Carrie, while still enthralled to the power of her family and her father in particular, is a more open-minded person. She has a bigger heart, and she is the person in some ways who has instigated the change in the Sinclair family that has happened by the end of ‘We Were Liars.’
The 1987 setting demanded period-specific texture, and Lockhart went looking for it in specific, granular places. She spent time tracking what was fashionable in food that decade, and she went equally deep into slang, but she wasn’t after generic period flavor. She wanted language that felt true to this particular group of teenagers on this particular island.
[paraphrased from audio] I also really went in deep to as many websites of ‘80s slang as I could and tried to pick the ones that I thought that this group of kids would use.
Carrie’s addiction to pills is central to the novel’s second half, and Lockhart drew on emotional material she had gathered years earlier while researching ‘Again Again,’ her previous novel, whose protagonist has a brother in recovery from heroin. Friends who had spoken openly with her about family members in similar situations became a resource she returned to when she sat down to write Carrie.
[paraphrased from audio] When I came to writing ‘Family of Liars,’ I tapped into some of the emotional stuff that I had learned from talking to those friends.
The personal thread
Love and suspicion for the same worldBeechwood Island is entirely invented, but the culture it depicts is one Lockhart knows from childhood. She spent many summers on Martha’s Vineyard, the island off Massachusetts that gave her firsthand knowledge of a particular strain of old-money New England summer life. When she described her relationship to that world at the Books Are Magic event, she named both sides of it without resolving the tension between them.
[paraphrased from audio] A deep love for the landscape, a deep love for the pleasures that some of that kind of very educated society offers... and yet also a suspicion and a discomfort with it at the same time. So that like that push-pull.
The Gothic atmosphere that runs through both Sinclair novels, the isolation, the sense of inevitability, the suggestion of a family curse, is not an accident of genre. Lockhart holds a doctorate in Victorian literature from Columbia University, and when Kirkus asked whether she was consciously deploying those tropes, her answer was both brief and pointed.
I have a Ph.D. in Victorian Literature....
The ellipsis does the work. She was laughing when she said it, but the implication was exact: of course those tropes are deliberate, and yes, she knows precisely what she is doing with them.
What she wants us to sit with
The question you cannot answer cleanlyLockhart has described ‘Family of Liars’ as turning on a single moral problem that Carrie cannot think her way out of. It is a problem she states in two related forms, each one tightening the screw a little further.
What if you are a person who has violence or criminality inside of you? What if you act on that—are you still redeemable as a good person? How do you reconcile your sense of yourself as good with an impulse to empower yourself in a dangerous way—or to express yourself in a dangerous way? This is a thread that’s running through my recent work.
In the Kirkus interview, she returned to the same territory from the perspective of the people around someone who has done harm, not just the person who did it.
What do you do when someone you love has done something terrible? What’s it like to do something terrible yourself and need loyalty from the people you love—the people who love you? And how do you love yourself when you’ve done something terrible?
By 2025, when NPR asked about her readers’ intense responses to her work, Lockhart connected the questions she builds into her fiction to a process she considers fundamental to being alive. She framed it not as a literary theme but as a daily problem.
I am ongoing interested in that question, right? When you’ve done something you’re ashamed of, do you sit under the rug? Do you, you know, get into that rug and pull everything out and look at it? Can you accept yourself? Can you tell yourself that you’re going to change? You know, can you find a place of forgiveness, or do you carry that weight with you all the time? I mean, this is a fundamental question about just being a person, right?
In a 2026 interview focused primarily on her subsequent novel ‘We Fell Apart,’ Lockhart was asked why she keeps returning to lies across all her books. Her answer located the interest not in plot mechanics but in something more vertiginous: the difficulty of knowing what actually happened, even to yourself.
The truth is subjective in many situations; people remember it differently, or tell it sideways, or hide it from themselves. It’s kind of the human condition, to mistrust your perceptions sometimes.