‘We Were Liars’ Author on Expanding Universe With New Book; Teases Second Season and Rain Spencer Adaptation

The We Were Liars universe continues to grow.

E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars book was released in 2014 and became a best-seller. But now more than a decade later, the author’s YA novel about the affluent Sinclair family who spend every summer on Beechwood, a wealthy fictional island off of Martha’s Vineyard, garnered new attention thanks to social media, TikTok aesthetic videos and a successful Prime Video series adaptation from Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie that stars Emily Alyn Lind, Esther McGregor, Shubham Maheshwari and Joseph Zada.

The series has been renewed for a second season and will follow E. Lockhart’s 2022 prequel novel, Family of Liars as well as feature new stories about the current cast of characters, the author teases.

“The prequel novel is a flashback to when the mom characters are teenagers. So you will see a whole story about that, but you will still see Cadence, you will still see Johnny, and you will still see all those sisters as adults. The showrunners are cooking up new stories for them,” E. Lockhart tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Though E. Lockhart says the showrunners “will come up with amazing news stories for the cast of characters from We Were Liars in season two,” she didn’t feel like she “had a new story to tell with those characters.” However, the underlying themes and setting still proved to be a “rich world” for imagination and the foundation for another story. “I’m interested in young people who kind of create a world unto themselves that is maybe different from the world that a patriarchal structure is enforcing,” E. Lockhart says.

Enter We Fell Apart, the author’s new book, out Nov. 4. Though not a direct sequel or prequel to We Were Liars, the novel takes place simultaneously with the original story and is set after the devastating fire of Beechwood home. The story centers on protagonist Matilda, who, after receiving a message from the father she’s never met — reclusive artist Kingsley Cello — ventures to spend the summer at his seaside home, Hidden Beach. Believing she’ll finally learn who her father is and more about herself, she is surprised to find Kingsley is nowhere to be found and instead meets Meer, her long-lost brother; Brock, a former child star battling demons; and Tatum, who may or may not want her to leave. But everyone is lying and there are secrets to be uncovered.

“One of the themes that goes throughout these novels is this idea of escaping the castle, escaping the kingdom. What does that mean for these new characters?” E. Lockhart says. “I was interested in continuing to explore the same themes with a different father figure at the head of the family institution and to see what I would come up with with a different king.”

Easter eggs of We Were Liars can be found throughout with mentions of the core liars and, at one point, the characters visiting the wreckage of Beechwood Island soon after the fire that burned the estate and killed three of the four liars. E. Lockhart says, “I really love that idea of bringing my characters onto the island at a time when Cadence would never have seen it.”

In a conversation ahead of the release of We Fell Apart, E. Lockhart spoke with THR about expanding the Liars universe with We Fell Apart, the second season of We Were Liars and her next book adaptation Genuine Fraud starring Rain Spencer.

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We Were Liars was renewed for a second season. And the second season is set to be based on the prequel novel, correct?

Yes, but also there will be new stories about our current cast. The prequel novel is a flashback to when the mom characters are teenagers. So you will see a whole story about that, but you will still see Cadence, you will still see Johnny, and you will still see all those sisters as adults, and the showrunners are cooking up new stories for them.

Given the show’s success, what did you make of the response to the characters and story?

Well, one of the fun things was that I knew that everyone was going to video themselves sobbing their eyes out because I had seen it happen with the book. When the book got big on TikTok in 2020, that was one of the types of videos that people made over and over — snot coming out of their noses, mascara running down their faces, heaving sobs. And I guess I didn’t give out a memo about that. (Laughs.) The showrunners and the actors, all those people were surprised that that’s what happened. And I was like, “Oh no. We knew that was going to happen. That was a given.” But people were tremendous and recording themselves watching the finale episode and crying or being shocked, in a pit of despair or whatever. It was delightful, and it was a lovely way to share a big emotional reaction to a show. I think that that is the thing that makes We Were Liars stand out from many other excellent thrillers and many other excellent YA TV shows. It delivers a big feeling.

You exec produced the show and penned the finale. What did you learn from that experience from a creative standpoint and how, if in any way, did that influence you when working on a new story like We Fell Apart?

One thing I really absorbed from Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie, who are the showrunners on We Were Liars, was they paid such close attention to the way each episode was structured and to creating a sense of resolution and a feeling of a cliffhanger at the same time, so that the story felt very propulsive. I was writing We Fell Apart for the most part at the same time as I was working on my episode. I wasn’t in the writers room the whole time, but I visited the writers room, and I came to the writers room to break my episode. And so I took those tools from that write’s room and applied them, I think, to We Fell Apart to make my plot more propulsive, to create more mysteries, to sort of throw more balls up in the air, storytelling wise, than I might not have otherwise.

We Were Liars was published in 2014. Then almost a decade later, you came out with Family of Liars in 2022. Now with We Fell Apart, you tell a new story that is set in the We Were Liars universe taking place after the devastating fire of Beechwood home. What made you want to revisit this world but with a new cast of characters?

I think the showrunners will come up with amazing new stories for the cast of characters from We Were Liars in season two, but I didn’t really feel I had a new story to tell with those characters. But the world is a rich world for my imagination, and the themes are themes that I’m still interested in exploring. I think over and over, I’m drawn to stories of very intense friendships that burn very bright and very intensely. I’m interested in young people who kind of create a world unto themselves that is maybe different from the world that a patriarchal structure is enforcing. And those are things you see in We Were Liars, and you also see in We Fell Apart. I also love a beachy Gothic mystery, and I figured out a way for the story of Matilda to intersect with the world of We Were Liars and with the characters who live across the water on Beachwood island. So I was excited to bring that all together and that story home, in some ways.

We Fell Apart is neither a prequel nor a sequel, but happens simultaneously with We Were Liars. How did you decide on that structural approach, and what were the challenges or benefits of overlapping timelines?

Well, one thing that happens near the beginning of We Fell Apart is that Matilda and the three boys take a boat out at night and go over to the wreckage of Beechwood Island. It’s a little bit ghoulish and gruesome. It’s only a week after the fire has devastated the island, but I felt really excited. I was like, “OK, what are they going to do there? What are they going to find? What are they going to learn about themselves, and what are they going to learn about the Sinclairs?” And so I got to write this kind of spooky, trespassing scene, where there’s the wreckage, but there’s also parts of the island that weren’t touched by the fire. There’s a tennis court. There’s leftover Chardonnay bottles. There’s a lemon leftover from the lemon hunt. They spend some time on the island walkways and down by the tiny beach where the liars spend so much of their time. And so I really love that idea of bringing my characters onto the island at a time when Cadence would never have seen it.

Matilda is the protagonist and the story follows her desire to meet her father, who she has never known. We also have a cast of characters including Meer, Brock, June and Tatum all seemingly keeping their own secrets. Can you talk about creating these characters and how did you decide on their personalities, conflicts and how they would reflect or contrast with the Sinclair family?

One of the themes that goes throughout these novels is this idea of escaping the castle, escaping the kingdom. What does that mean for these new characters? And answering that question was one of the ways that I built those characters. So Brock, for example, has been a child star, and you know how that can mess with a person’s head. After he was a child star, he struggled through an addiction and a rehab. And so then he’s left the kind of institution of his sitcom that he spent his childhood in. He’s left the institution of the rehab, and he’s looking for another life. He needs a different life. And he’s come at the age of 18, on a pilgrimage to an artist whose work spoke to him, and that is Matilda’s father. He’s been living in this house for a year trying to rebuild himself, and he’s entered a new institution, which is the house that Kingsley runs together with his wife.

Meer, Matilda’s brother, has always lived in the castle and cannot really see himself outside of the castle. He’s been homeschooled for the past few years. He doesn’t have a lot of a social life outside of the people who live with him, and he really only knows one way of life. So he’s the character who is like Cadence, looking for how to define himself separately from his family of origin and all of its beliefs and values and what he wants to keep and what he wants to leave.

Matilda’s father is this famous painter, and he’s preoccupied by ideas to do with escape, and that is, in fact, actually a crucial part of his character and a crucial part of the plot that I don’t want to spoil. Matilda sees all these paintings of his before she ever meets him. I was thinking about the different ways that he might express the same conflicts that really Brock and Meer are also going through.

I think Tatum has a little magic in him. His parents are dead. He’s a boy without a place, and he has been living in this castle for some time, but he’s itching to leave, which Brock and Meer are not. He has his reasons and his secrets. There’s reasons that he that he wants out, and reasons that he doesn’t leave. So I think that’s how he fits into that theme. He’s ready to go. He’s looking for that escape.

Like with We We Liars and Beechwood, the setting of this story is such an integral part of it, whether it be literally or symbolically. Can you talk about creating Hidden Beach and the atmospheric details of this world that Matilda has entered?

Well, I was visiting the island of Martha’s Vineyard, which has been an inspiration for a lot of my stories, and a friend of mine invited us on a tour to see the home of a famous brutalist architect named Araldo Cossutta. His family property, that was really just his summer property, was built to be like an artist colony. It has all these guest houses and this pool house with all these bedrooms in it, and it has an incredible circular pool and really unusual brutalist style architecture with everything in wood. So it is really this incredible looking place and is also quite castle-y. It has four towers. I was touring around this house, and it was also in quite a bit of disrepair, especially the outbuildings, because it had been inherited I think by Cossutta’s children, and nobody had been living in it for some time. I felt like I’d walked into a novel. So I asked if I could take pictures. I added all kinds of things, and I fictionalized it, and I moved where it is on Martha’s Vineyard. And I took Cossutta out of it completely and gave it to this famous painter instead. But it was sparked by this incredible piece of architecture that I got the privilege to visit.

You touched on this earlier but there are themes in this book that you enjoy exploring: privilege, family legacy, parental abandonment. What was it about those themes and others that interested you and what you wanted to explore in this story?

Well, I grew up as a scholarship kid at a lot of pretty fancy educational institutions. I think that while that was not always a fun position to be in socially, it was a real gift to my imagination, and it gave me an interest in thinking about social class in America, where we like to think that we don’t really have social classes but we do and there are very often characters in my novels who have one foot in and one foot out of some environment of privilege, such as an educational institution or a family. I think the theme comes back over and over for me is the fitting in without fitting in, the membership that is not complete membership. I think that in We Were Liars and Family of Liars, the father figure of Harris Sinclair looms very large. I was interested in continuing to explore the same themes with a different father figure at the head of the family institution, and to see what I would come up with with a different king.

We Fell Apart has a love story with Matilda and Tatum. In We Were Liars, we were able to follow Cadence and Gat being each other’s first love but obviously not getting that happy ending together given Gat dies in the fire. Did not being able to have that happy ending for Cadence and Gat influence what would happen with Matilda and Tatum?

I wanted to write a book that would be really satisfying on its own for readers who have not set foot in this universe. I think that in many ways, a really strong love story was one of those essential pieces. I worked really hard on the love story of Matilda and Tatum to give it some enormous obstacles. There’s ways in which he is the worst possible person for her to fall in love with, and he is lying and he is keeping secrets and at the same time, he is the best person for her to fall in love with. I spend a bunch of time working on that. I think because the love stories in Family of Liars and We Were Liars, don’t end happily — these stories have bleak elements — but they are also fundamentally hopeful. They’re supposed to be about complicated, messed up people in a complicated, messed up world, but there should be a feeling of hope. I think in We Fell Apart, a lot of the hope is located in that love.

This book also has a twist. I know we don’t want to give away spoilers but going into this, did you know what the twist was going to be or is that something that happened organically as you were working on the story?

I don’t always plan it out, but for We Fell Apart I had all of this planned out pretty carefully.

Do you think any characters from We Fell Apart will be incorporated in season two of We Were Liars?

I do not know the answer to that yet!

Would you want them to be?

They always could be! It’s called a We Were Liars novel, so the showrunners are entitled to make whatever plans they want. But I know that they have a lot of tricks up their sleeve that will be surprises, even to people who’ve read all the books. They want to deliver that same exciting plot twist feeling.

Are there more stories you still want to tell in this universe?

Maybe. I haven’t said no. I don’t have anything I can talk about yet.

Given this book can be read as a standalone, if someone picks up We Fell Apart fresh (with no prior Liars background), what aspects do you hope still resonate or surprise?

I mean it’s basically a story about a big, mysterious castle by the sea, where a young woman comes in search of a father and, instead of the father, finds three super cute teenage boys. What’s not to like?

In addition to the Liars universe being on TV, it was also announced that your book Genuine Fraud is now getting the adaptation treatment with Amazon. When did the conversations start for this book being adapted?

Genuine Fraud actually has been in development somewhere else for a long time, but it moved over to Amazon fairly recently with a new showrunner, Sinead Daley, who I’m really excited about. She worked on The Summer I Turned Pretty and she worked on the new Stephanie Meyer TV show. She is just so incredibly smart, such an astute storyteller, so willing to go big in terms of darkness and emotion, so much respect for the YA storytelling framework. I think she’s going to be amazing. And then we attach Rain Spencer. I think she’s absolutely terrific, and she’s going to nail it. So I’m excited!

What made Rain the perfect fit for this story? What conversations, if any, have you had with her about the story?

We attached Rain early on. Rain read the book, met with Sinead. I went out to dinner with Rain, but I was, I was not going to say no to Rain Spencer. Really, really charismatic. She’s a great dramatic actress as well as a comedian. The book has a lot of action sequences and also physical transformations. So I think people are going to get a chance to see a side of her that they have not seen yet, and that’s going to be really fun!

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We Fell Apart is now available.