Exclusive Interview
E. Lockhart Explains How New Book ‘We Fell Apart’ Expands ‘We Were Liars’ Universe
When it comes to We Were Liars‘ journey from book to screen, it’s safe to say that adaptation was no easy task.
E. Lockhart‘s first YA romantic thriller came out in 2014, spinning a tale of summertime young love into a psychological thriller with a dramatic twist ending. Now, the story has made its way onto the small screen, featuring a selection of industry alums and acting newcomers who bring the story to life in a way readers couldn’t have imagined a decade prior.
Swooon sat down with author E. Lockhart to discuss the inspiration behind the story, which elements she considered the most important to keep or adapt, and what’s next for the We Were Liars universe, in both the literary and streaming worlds. Scroll to read our full interview with E. Lockhart!
We’d love to start at the beginning. Where did the original idea for We Were Liars come from?
E. Lockhart: We Were Liars came out in 2014, and it started with an idea: I had to write a story set on a private island. The book takes place on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts that’s owned by one particular family. And I had an idea that there would be grandparents and adults, and a bunch of teenagers who were all the same age, and maybe [they’re] not all related to each other, but they would have all been spending summer after summer together, year after year. And I liked the idea of this very intense summer friendship, and that then there might be a romance of some kind.
I didn’t really understand that I was writing a thriller instead of a sort of thoughtful comedy. That’s what I had come up with in the YA space writing. I wrote The Boyfriend List*, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, How to Be Bad, and a bunch of other books that could be described as comedies. [But] once you put people on an isolated island, they’re in a very small, enclosed story world without access to the rest of the world and its resources. That’s a pressure cooker for characters, and that is why so many thrillers are set on isolated islands. So I quickly realized I was writing a thriller.
At the time, you shared that The Fault in Our Stars author John Green had convinced you to restructure the ending into what was eventually published. Can you tell us anything about the original structure?
Lockhart: The last line of the book [now] is, “I endure. “John [Green] read the book to give a quote for it, and he gave a very juicy quote that’s very easy to find on the internet. He wrote me a lovely note about [the current ending], and he said, ‘I think I endure is a really great last line, but it’s not actually the last line. You have a little chunk of text after that, and I think that you could take that bit of story and put it earlier so that you can end with that line.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yes, you are right, John Green.’ So, it was not a different ending with a different story. It was the structure of content that was already there.
Were there any aspects of We Were Liars that you were firm on not changing between the book and the adaptation?
Lockhart: We Were Liars was in development for many, many years. Basically, since it was published, it’s been in development for either film or television. So, for film, I think there were five different writers and two different directors, and there was a whole other television version of it with more than one person working on it, including me. And one thing that every single person did, that [was] really not gonna work, is to take out the character of Ed [Gat’s uncle].
Ed (Rahul Kohli) seems like he is a secondary character. He’s just an extra grown-up who keeps milling around and isn’t that important, and he doesn’t do any big action. I mean, there’s some romantic plotline with him and Carrie (Mamie Gummer), but it’s like, “What if you didn’t have that? That would be fine.” But if you take Ed out, then at the end of the story, the Sinclair family is back to where they were before, and they have not had any growth. They do not have an arc. There has not been a change in the situation of the family as a result of all the big stuff that happened, right? Ed still being there, and Carrie and Ed still being together, however compromised or difficult that might be, is really important to the arc of the story as a whole. And when Carina [Adly MacKenzie] and Julie [Plec] asked me the same question that you just asked me: Is there any really important thing that we should know that we should not mess around with? I said, “You need Ed.” And they were like, “Oh, yeah, of course we need Ed. We totally know why we need Ed.” And I was like, “Oh, they already understand the book. They understand the structure. They have already thought about the themes, they never considered getting rid of him.”
Jessie Redmond / Prime
Were there any major changes you were happy to see as We Were Liars moved from book to screen?
Lockhart: One thing I really loved was that television is written by a group of people, and we had a writers’ room with a lot of writers of all different kinds of backgrounds and different kinds of skills. People who were great structuralists, people who had great comedy chops and thriller chops, and so on. Included in that group of writers were four different writers of Indian descent, and so one of the things that they were able to do was generously share their lived experiences. Sometimes they disagreed with each other and had very different life experiences that certainly were not a monolith, but they had a lot of different experiences that they shared that deepened the characters of Ed and Gat in a lot of ways, so that they are fleshed out and more authentic and more complex than I ever could have written by myself in the novel. I think people are going to be psyched to see that. Touring around and meeting readers, I think there’s a lot of love for this character of Gat, played by Shubham Maheshwari, for his being, this lovely, deep, intellectual, romantic lead, who is also of Indian descent. I think [watching the show], they’re going to get to see more of him in a really good, authentic way.
As you said, We Were Liars was published in 2014. Almost a decade later, you came out with Family of Liars in 2022. Why did you choose to return to the We Were Liars universe?
Lockhart: All these people started reading [We Were Liars] in 2020. When it came out in 2014, it was my most popular book. It was on The New York Times bestseller list. That was delightful. And then it came back in 2020 during the pandemic, when all of these TikTok creators started making videos about it, and they made these really, really emotional, vulnerable videos about their reactions to the book. Sometimes they were angry or hated the book. Sometimes they had really big feelings, or they made these aesthetic videos that were like, “Welcome to Beechwood Island. Welcome to the world of the beautiful Sinclair family.” [You’d see] kids jumping off cliffs in bathing suits, swimming, boating, bonfires on the beach, golden retrievers, lobster rolls, all that kind of stuff. So all these people were like exercising their creativity in response to my novel, and that was bringing me readers. I felt so lucky to have readers. You know, I was just as isolated as anybody else during the pandemic, and at the same time, I had all these people reading my story, so I wanted to give them something back.
You’re returning to the We Were Liars universe again at the end of this year. What can you tell us about your upcoming book, We Fell Apart?
Lockhart: We Fell Apart comes out in November 2025. It is set in the We Were Liars universe, but it is neither a prequel nor a sequel. It actually happens simultaneously with We Were Liars, so it will overlap, and it will reveal a lot of new things about the Sinclair family, but it starts off across the water on Martha’s Vineyard on a very different, large Gothic beach.
What inspired this new story?
Lockhart: I was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, and my grandparents on my mom’s side had this very modest house that they built in the ’70s, which is now owned by my aunt and uncle. I did not grow up like the Sinclair family at all, but I did grow up going to Martha’s Vineyard in the summer, to this little, modest house. It’s not by the water or anything, but [while] I was there, a friend of a friend invited me to visit [a] house and tour it. And it turned out to be the summer residence of a famous brutalist architect who basically built a castle, but with weathered wood shingles, and it’s got four towers and a huge circular pool. The whole thing was in disrepair. It had been kind of left to ruin by his heirs for a long time, and the new owner was just starting to fix it up, and I think he’s landmarked it and is gonna make it sort of open to the public in some way. But this was early days, and I felt like I was walking into a novel that I had yet to write, you know? So I took all these pictures, and that house became the model for the house in We Fell Apart.
Do you think any characters from We Fell Apart will make their way into the onscreen We Were Liars universe?
Lockhart: Julie [Plec] and Carina [Adly MacKenzie] have definitely been the earliest readers of We Fell Apart. That’s all I can say.
Finally, we recently asked the stars of We Were Liars if Cadence and Gat would have ended up together if their story wasn’t cut short. Do you think their love was made to last?
Lockhart: I think it’s a story about first love. And first love doesn’t always last forever, but that doesn’t make it any less important or special, right? Things are not only special because they last.
We Were Liars, Season 1, Streaming Now, Prime Video.
