‘We Were Liars’ Author on Show’s Finale, Bringing Book’s Twist to Screen

[This story contains spoilers for Prime Video’s We Were Liars.]

After the We Were Liars book was released in 2014, author E. Lockhart had 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, has garnered new attention thanks to social media and TikTok aesthetic videos, and now a Prime Video series adaptation starring Emily Alyn Lind, Esther McGregor, Shubham Maheshwari and Joseph Zada (who notably scored the lead role in the upcoming Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping as Haymitch).

Throughout the eight-episode series from showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie, the story follows Lind’s Cadence attempt to process a tragedy that occurred at the Sinclair’s Beechwood home while suffering from amnesia. As Cadence tries to piece together the events that unfolded that night, the secrets of her family and tight-knit liars comes to light. The show, which highlights themes of wealth, social class, love and family abides by the book’s formula of alternating between flashbacks and the present time, while leading to a twist that, to this day, continues to stun readers.

“Sometimes they were throwing the book across the room. Sometimes they were weeping copiously, and snot was dripping out of their nose and mascaras running on their face. The essence of those responses was, WTF, this book?” Lockhart tells The Hollywood Reporter about fan reactions to her story.

Amid the show’s release, Lockhart talks about helping bring her book to life onscreen, writing the finale and how the twist calls for fans of the show to “lie” in true Liars fashion.

Before talking about the show, I wanted to go back to writing the book. You have a doctorate in English literature from Columbia University (specifically the 19th-century British novel). How did that lead to writing a YA fiction novel?

When I went to Columbia, I imagined that what I was going to do was read a lot of Dickens and Bronte, other amazing writers from the 19th and early 20th century and kind of be immersed in this world of unpacking fiction and understanding it in deep ways. And that was part of it, but it was an age of massive focus on deconstruction, post-colonial theory. It was not that long into my doctoral work, when I realized that what I would do when I finished was teach college forever. Suddenly I thought, Oh, my goodness, I have made a mistake. And I realized that what I wanted to do was be telling these stories. I wanted to understand fiction making, and so I started writing creatively while I was in graduate school. I really never went on the job market. Instead, I began to tell stories myself.

We Were Liars was first published in 2014 and despite it being some time, the book has seemingly gotten a new life via social media. What was that new attention like?

We Were Liars was my best-selling book when it first came out, and then, as it always happens, it was no longer a best-seller, and I went on to write other novels. And then in 2020, when we were all living through the pandemic, Tiktok creators started making a new kind of book recommendation video that was very exciting and very creative. So instead of simply saying, “Hey, here’s a book I like. Maybe you would like it too and here’s why,” they were making aesthetic videos that brought readers into the world of this privately owned island off the coast of Massachusetts with pictures of kids jumping off cliffs to go swimming and bonfires on the beach and summer love and all of that. The other kind of videos they made were very vulnerable videos of themselves reading the ending to the novel and responding to it. And sometimes they were throwing the book across the room. Sometimes they were weeping copiously, and snot was dripping out of their nose and mascaras running on their face. The essence of those responses was, WTF, this book? And so people were either exercising their creative [outlet] or sharing their vulnerability. I felt very lucky that my book was one of several that got that kind of attention.

Was there any interesting commentary about the story that you notice now that kind of surprised you, or was interesting to you that maybe you hadn’t thought of before when the book was first released?

You are a novelist who spends a lot of time on TikTok looking at reviews of your book, you are not going to empower yourself to be an open, free creator. You are going to give yourself a lot of inhibitions, complexes and bad feelings. I do not spend time Googling myself. I was grateful to be having them, no question. But I cannot and will not do a deep dive.

A We Were Liars show was first reported in 2023 at Prime Video. Was there an interest to adapt this story? Why was now the perfect time to have it be adapted?

We Were Liars has been in development since it first came out. So first for [a] feature, I think it had five writers and two different directors attached, and then at another streaming service for television with a different showrunner. And then they came back to me, and I was able to place it with [Julie] Plec and [Carina Adly] MacKenzie and the reason I went with them, among a bunch of different offers, was that they said they would showrun it, so I wasn’t optioning it just to a producer or to a streaming service. Instead, there was a creative team attached that had made a ton of super bingeable, sexy, fun television that I really enjoyed, and also both of those people had read the book multiple times, had a lot of very thoughtful things to say about it.

You exec produced the series and assisted with casting and location scouting. Was it important to you to have big input on the adaptation of this? What kind of conversations did you have with what was important to you when bringing this to life?

Well I wrote the finale, and I felt great that they trusted me with the finale and to bring the story home. I had been part of a development room that happened before Plec wrote the pilot, and that was a 10-week conversation with the three of us, but also a bunch of other writers, and that was about the core themes that we would bring from the book to the show, what the most important elements were, what was the emotional effect we wanted to have. I think one thing that makes this show different from the other Succession-style family dramas about wealthy people behaving badly or from the other beachy thrillers (Sirens, Perfect Couple, etc.) or from the other teen dramas, I have enough chutzpah to say that our story is more emotional than all of those, and what we want to do is really connect you to these characters and pack an emotional wallop at the end. I love all those shows I just mentioned, but that is not their main effect. And so once those themes and central concerns were clear they went off and had a writers room that I was not in [because] I was home writing a novel. But I came to the writers room and spent two weeks breaking the finale together with the group of writers.

You wrote the last episode, which is obviously pivotal given it’s when the book’s twist is revealed. Did you pitch to write the last episode and what was important to you to write that one specifically? Was it your first time writing a screenplay?

They invited me to write it. I’ve written a couple pilots for different streamers that just have never gotten made. So this was my first piece of television writing to be filmed, but not my first piece of television writing. I was a little daunted by the action sequences, because when I’m writing fiction and there are action sequences, I have to work long and hard to get those to kind of pop off the page. My natural space is dialogue, feelings, romance, banter. Action is always something I really work on and suddenly I was given the most action of the entire season. But a room full of writers helping you structure a piece of writing is a really fun gift. You don’t get that as a novelist, and you don’t get it as a writer of pilots, either. So I love being in the writers room. I loved hearing everything that Plec and MacKenzie had to say about the structure that they wanted the episode to have in order to pay off all the things that had come before. That writers room is a fascinating and fun place to be.

Given the twist is so pivotal in the book, part of its power comes from people not knowing it. Given the book has been out there for some time, were you concerned at all about whether the show might be able to deliver the same punch as your book? Can you talk about crafting the twist for the show versus when you crafted it in the book?

You can always look up spoilers on the Internet. This is possible for every single movie, every single book, every single television show. I don’t think people want to have their their experience spoiled. They don’t want the end to the mystery. They don’t want the solution to Cadence’s amnesia until they experience it in this show. So we have for the show a similar campaign to the one that we had for the book when it first came out, which is just inviting people who know the ending, people who’ve read the book or people who will binge-watch the show on June 18, to lie. Inviting them to be in the know with us and to lie. I think it’s fun to be in the club of people who know a story already. And one thing that I never thought would happen with We Were Liars, because it is a story with a big plot twist, is I never thought I would have readers who reread it over and over and over. People come to my signings with post-it notes and sticky notes all through their copies. They come with a tattoo on their arm. They come and tell me how many times they’ve read the book. So I don’t think we’re worried. People are not there only for the plot twist. They’re there for the feelings and the characters in the world.

I imagine readers rereading it are looking back on details to put two and two together that leads to the ending or the little details they maybe didn’t notice before. What are the things they’ve told you about their rereads?

One thing is that they just want to hang out with the liars again. I think that even though this is an island where some terrible things happen, people like returning to Beechwood. They like returning to the friendship and to the relationships between those characters. The other thing is that both the book and the show are threaded completely through with hints and clues to the mystery that you see on a second watch or you see on a second read.

Given the story explores a variety of things whether it be wealth and privilege, friendship, family, and class, what did you express with the creatives on this show that you wanted to get across thematically in this series that you aimed to get across in this book?

There’s a scene in the finale where Cadence is talking to Johnny, and they’re both talking about having huge regrets and shame and horror at things that they have done in their life. And I think a lot of my books and the show ask this question of, What do you do when you are ashamed of yourself? What do you do when you’ve done something horrible? Can you forgive yourself? Can you make some kind of reparation? Can you go on in the world and do good things and still accept the bad things that you’ve done? A moral reckoning that I think is part of the journey to adulthood. I really love that scene, and I love the way Joseph Zada and Emily Alyn Lind acted. Johnny says to Cadence, “You’re going to go on and do good things. That doesn’t change the past, but you’re going to go on and live a whole life full of beauty and goodness. And that’s an option for you, and that’s always an option for all of us.”

Given you were on set during filming, what kind of conversations did the actors have with you, if any, about their characters?

They were all incredibly thoughtful and delightful. That said, if you’re the novelist and you are on set, even if you wrote the episode that they’re filming, you do not get in there and start talking to the actors about their characters. You let the director talk to the actors. You let the showrunner talk to the actors, but you do not want to be getting in their heads or contradicting something. So the chats I’ve had with the actors, I usually try to stay out of that and just show my appreciation and enthusiasm for what they’re doing, because they had all read the books. They had all an investment in portraying the characters vulnerably and accurately and truthfully, and they were doing it. So I did not need to spend my time like talking to them about Johnny’s motivation, or whatever. I needed to just say, “You’re bringing it!” I just tried to show them the love.

As in the book, the show’s characters are predominantly white, which reflects the Sinclair family’s privileged and isolated world. However, the story explores privilege and the societal impact of white identity and social status especially with Gat and Ed. And Gat expresses that to Cadence in multiple moments throughout the show and obviously leading to their decision of burning the Beechwood home. Can you talk about exploring that in your story and Gat’s place in relation to the other liars that you wanted to get across? 

Well, whenever I’m writing an important character who has a very different identity or lived experience than my own, there’s always research to do, but there also needs to be a point of entry where I best connect to that character myself. Gat is a middle-class New Yorker, intellectual kid, kind of on fire with ideas and the urge to critique and unpack and understand the world around him. And it means he talks too much sometimes, and it means sometimes his friends don’t want to hear what he’s got to say. And he’s navigating that, and he’s also got one foot in and one foot out of this really privileged world. Those ways that I just described him, that was me. I was a scholarship kid at some really fancy educational institutions. I was that kid with my hand up all the time. I was the kid who talked more than my friends wanted to hear me talk. I was always the one who did the reading and was yammering on in class. So I found these connection points between me and Gat, and I think that’s why as a white female author, I was able to find connection points with a teenage boy of Indian descent.

When we were writing the TV show, Plec and MacKenzie hired four writers of Indian descent to work on our show, so we had people of different experience levels and skill levels. We had a wide range of experience and backgrounds in the room. But in terms of our writers of Indian descent, they also shared their lived experience with the room and deepened and fleshed out, not only the character of Gat but also his Uncle Ed, so that there’s more to their story than it could ever have been in the book authored just by me. It’s more authentic, it’s more nuanced, and it’s just better than we could have done without all those different voices at the table. I’m excited for people to see that. I think they’re gonna get to know these characters in a in a bigger, more authentic way,

We learn at the end that Cadence is the sole Liar given that the rest of the Liars were killed in the fire at Beechwood and she has been hallucinating their existence ever since. She is left to not only grapple with this tragedy and her involvement in that, but also what’s next: continue on with the Sinclair legacy and uphold the lie of what really happened that night to the public or distance herself entirely from the family. Can you talk about her journey and ending?

I think in a lot of ways, Cadence’s position is not simple. We didn’t want to dumb anything down, but we wanted to have a feeling of release. At the end, I was talking about the island being isolated from the rest of the world, the pressures that happen when you’re spending all summer on one island with a patriarch who sort of dictates what the rules of that world are. What happens at the close of We Were Liars is that Cadence kicks off her high heels and she runs down the beach barefoot. That was a gorgeous moment. I don’t think Emily Lynn was supposed to go barefoot, because, honestly, they don’t want our actresses running bare feet down the shore. But the drones were up, the shoes were off! And then she gets in the boat and she drives away. She’s going away from the island, having set herself free from the rigidities, rules, the prejudices, the bullshit of the family. We all know that this can be an ongoing journey to separate from your family of origin. And it’s not a simple thing at all. And so, you know, we shall see.

In true suspenseful fashion, the story ended with suspense. Can you talk about that ending moment with Johnny’s spirit speaking with his mom, Carrie (Mamie Gummer)?

I wrote a prequel novel to We Were Liars, which is called Family of Liars. And that scene between Johnny and Carrie is very similar to the opening scene of Family of Liars. It is a tip of the hat to the story that I built in that second book.

There is a prequel to We Were Liars released in 2022, Family of Liars, and it was also optioned. Do you know if a prequel series might happen if We Were Liars does well?

I don’t have any news to share about season two yet. [But] it’s not a limited series!

Then you’re also releasing a third book in the We Were Liar universe, which is releasing this fall. What can readers expect in We Fell Apart?

We Fell Apart is set in the world of We Were Liars, and it has a new cast of characters, but it also reveals a lot of Sinclair family secrets. So it intersects with We Were Liars throughout, and it happens the same time period as We Were Liars in another big, beachy, Gothic House across the water on Martha’s Vineyard.

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We Were Liars is streaming now on Prime Video.