Interview with E. Lockhart, author of 'We Were Liars'

 

Earlier this year I found what is, quite possibly, my ultimate 2014 Favourite Book - 'We WereLiars' by E. Lockhart. No doubt you’ve heard of this book, which has just been released in Australia by Allen & Unwin and is making some serious waves overseas. 

 In my review of the advanced copy I received form the US, I said of ‘We Were Liars’: “haunting and visceral, full of poignancy and sugary sweetness everyone should read this.” So when the opportunity arose to interview E. Lockhart (who also authored another favourite book of mine, ‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’), I naturally jumped at the chance. 

The images you see in this Q&A are from the 'We Were Liars' tumblr and Pinterest pages - something you should definitely check out as a great new addition to the YA social media marketing sphere (and a great behind-the-scenes look at Lockhart's inspiration for the book)!

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Q: How were you first published – agent or slush pile?

  Agent. But it was not the first project my agent had tried to sell.

Q: Are you a ‘plotter’ or a ‘pantser’ - that is, do you meticulously plot your novel before writing, or do you ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ and let the story evolve naturally?

I often restructure my novels in major ways after a first draft is finished.

Q: How long did it take you to write ‘We Were Liars’, from first idea to final manuscript?

I spent 18 months writing the book, but I wrote the proposal and sold it a year before I began writing it.   I do that a lot.  I sell all my books on proposal, now.

Q: Where do story ideas generally start for you? Do you first think of the character, theme, ending? Or is it just a free-fall?

It is different with every book. With We Were Liars I thought of the setting first.  I was interested in an isolated island where people summer year after year, and the kinds of bonds those people would form.

Q: The Sinclairs feel like a very Kennedy-esque American family with a lot of skeletons in their closet. Where did the inspiration for them come from, and what sort of research did you do before writing ‘We Were Liars’?

I think rivalry between siblings  is universal. So is intergenerational conflict. I didn’t base the Sinclairs on anyone in particular, but I have seen people like that around when vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island in Massachusetts with a large and wealthy summer population.

Q: ‘We Were Liars’ has a very tricky narrator in Cadence ‘Cady’ Sinclair Eastman – especially because her narration leaks into the bigger mystery of the book. It reads seamlessly, and a lot of the time I thought it was interesting how readers were piecing together the mystery when Cady was reluctant to. How hard was it to write that narration, and how many drafts before you nailed the unreliable first-person?

The narration in We Were Liars was very, very difficult. I’d estimate 20 drafts.  Depends on what you count as a draft. Maybe 40.

 

Q: I’m also a big, big fan of ‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’, which also has a very unique narrator in an omniscient third-person who reads like a biographer of the future (infamous) Frankie Landau-Banks. I thought it was such a unique way to tackle the defining moment in a young woman’s life – what inspired you to write that book in such a way?

Thank you. The narrator in Disreputable History was very fun to write, but it wasn’t a conscious decision.  The first paragraph came out in that voice and that was that.  All my novels have stylized narration, but most of them are first person. That book is just in third.  Opinionated third person isn’t that common.

Q: 'We Were Liars' is one of the biggest YA books of 2014 - it's getting such rave reviews and a real word-of-mouth fandom is growing. So, have there been any offers to adapt it for film or TV? ... also, who would your dream cast be? 

We Were Liars has been bought for film by Imperative Entertainment, which also bought the screenplay adaptation I wrote . Someone else will rewrite the screenplay, though – a proper screenwriter.  And someone else will cast it – an awesome director, hopefully. 

Q: What’s the appeal in writing for younger readers?

Adolescence is a chaotic time of life in which huge mental, physical, social and sexual chanes happen.  People separate from their families. They get new bodies. They redefine themselves. They fall in love for the first time.  It is fascinating.

Q: Favourite author(s) of all time?

Jaclyn Moriarty is my favorite YA writer. 

Q: Favourite book(s)?

I love so many. A book that I thought about a lot writing We Were Liars is The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

Q: Do you have any advice for budding young writers?

Read.  A lot.  I know not a single working writer who is not remarkably well-read. It is part of the job.

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We Were Liars is available from all good bookshops in Australia from August 1

'We Were Liars' by E. Lockhart

Received from NetGalley

From the BLURB:

A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

So, at the beginning of my ARC (received via NetGalley) there’s a note to the reader from Beverly Horowitz, Vice President and Publisher of Delacorte Press. And I think what little Horowitz says about this book and the plot is kinda perfect, and the ideal way to summarise (without really summarising, but more importantly not giving anything away) about this book.

The beautiful Sinclair family on a windswept private island, 

four friends who are unconditionally loyal to 

one another, 

a lot of witty banter, 

and desperate true love.  

Also …  

family secrets, 

hallucinations, 

a terrifying accident, 

and many golden retrievers.

Horowitz goes on to say E. Lockhart’s new young adult novel is “a dazzler. It’s suspenseful, literary and romantic. It’s a modern, mazelike suspense story…” and that’s exactly right.

The Sinclairs are a Kennedy-esque American family; good democrats who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower. There are three Sinclair daughters who have spawned several cherished Sinclair grandchildren.

Seventeen-year-old Cadence ‘Cady’ Sinclair Eastman is the oldest (and most beloved) Sinclair grandchild. She lives in Vermont with her single mother (her father walking out on the family not so long ago) but in the summer they travel to Beechwood Island. Windmere House is her grandfather’s imposing property, and she looks forward to summer every year when she can return there and reunite with her cousins – Johnny, Mirren, and Gat, the Indian-American son of her aunt’s partner. They are The Liars.

We do not believe in explicit displays of distress. Our upper lips are stiff, and it is possible people are curious about us because we do not show them our hearts. 

It is possible that we enjoy the way people are curious about us.

I became a fan of E. Lockhart after reading her Printz Honor book ‘TheDisreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’ – an utterly unique and darkly funny young adult novel about a (now) infamous young woman who shakes up the old boy foundations of her boarding school. I thought that book had set a pretty hard benchmark for Lockhart, but I can say with complete confidence that ‘We Were Liars’ comes pretty darn close to surpassing even the brilliance of that book.

Told with lashings of King Lear and twisted fairytales, ‘We Were Liars’ is a haunting novel that touches on greed, memories and the bonds of friendship. It’s a little bit beautiful and a little bit terrifying all at once.  

I changed the course of her life. I changed the fate of the family. The Liars and I.

And the writing is superb. Some of Lockhart’s sentences are downright luscious and lyrical, perfectly capturing the magnificence of youth and especially first love;

We looked at the sky. So many stars, it seemed like a celebration, a grand, illicit party the galaxy was holding after the humans had been put to bed. 

Lockhart’s story is so immersive and guttural – it’s a tall order asking readers to go on this journey with Cady, but it’s also an immensely readable page-turner.

I also loved that this is a book that praises youth and treats it with such tenderness. Cady and Gat especially feel so strongly for one another, and though they’re young Lockhart doesn’t treat them as anything other than soulmates – understanding perfectly how important this time is for young people, and how all those ‘firsts’ so imprint on them. I also appreciated that Lockhart gave shout-outs to some of her favourite YA authors, including Jaclyn Moriarty (an author Cadence has been reading all summer).

This is easily a favourite book of 2014.

haunting and visceral,

full of poignancy and sugary sweetness

everyone should read this.

5/5

‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’ by E. Lockhart

From the BLURB:

Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14:

Debate Club.
Her father's "bunny rabbit."
A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school.

Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15:

A knockout figure.
A sharp tongue.
A chip on her shoulder.
And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend: the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston.

Frankie Landau-Banks.

No longer the kind of girl to take "no" for an answer.
Especially when "no" means she's excluded from her boyfriend's all-male secret society.
Not when her ex-boyfriend shows up in the strangest of places.
Not when she knows she's smarter than any of them.
When she knows Matthew's lying to her.
And when there are so many, many pranks to be done.

Frankie Landau-Banks, at age 16:

Possibly a criminal mastermind.
This is the story of how she got that way.

Frankie Landau-Banks grew up over the summer. Her frizzy hair smoothed, legs got long, bra filled out and now heads are turning, for a change.

To her family she was ‘bunny’, the last-ditch effort to save her parents flailing marriage, and her father’s last (shattered) dream to have a boy.

To her fellow pupils at the prestigious Alabaster Preparatory Academy, she was known as Zada’s little tag-along sister.

But now Frankie is sixteen, and by the end of the new school year she will have abducted a Guppy, campaigned for the rights of vegetables, created a subtle feminist rebellion and become the most despised student on campus.

This is her story, or at least, the prelude to her life’s story.

‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’ was the 2009 Printz Honor contemporary young adult book by E. Lockhart. It was also a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Wow. Just, ‘wow’. I adored this book. ‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’ is exploring big ideas very subtly, and with a phenomenal narrative voice. This book covers a lot of teen dramas; dealing with social power-plays, sexism, feminism and inequality.

Frankie is starting at Alabaster boarding school afresh. She has gone up a cup-size over the summer, and now the popular senior boys are paying her attention. In particular, Matthew Livingston, heir to a newspaper empire and one of the Kings of Alabaster. But as Frankie and Matthew’s relationship gets serious, his friends start vying with Frankie for his attentions, in particular Alessandro ‘Alpha’ Tesorieri. When Frankie pieces together a curious puzzle concerning a secret all-male Alabaster society (so named the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds), Frankie concocts a plan to win her boyfriend’s affections (and attentions) and insert herself into the masculine exclusivity of the tempting Basset Hounds.

But as their pranks get wilder and more politically-minded, Frankie starts to really come to care for the floppy-eared rebellion. She starts questioning her place as a ‘little woman’ in a school of men.

The storyline could have deluged into so-so, mediocre territory if not for the utterly remarkable third-person narration that makes ‘Disreputable History’ a stand-out read. Our omniscient narrator feels more like a biographer. Someone who is picking apart Frankie Landau-Banks’ life history, and looking for the triggering moment that made her who she is today (as this God-like voice muses, she could have gone on to be a criminal mastermind, or president of the United States. At the very least.) We are given the impression that Frankie has become a person-of-interest, and now the time has come to sort through her sordid life history and look for contributing factors to her remarkable life;

How does a person become the person she is? What are the factors in her culture, her childhood, her education, her religion, her economic stature, her sexual orientation, her race, her everyday interactions – what stimuli lead her to make choices other people will despise her for?
This chronicle is an attempt to mark out the contributing elements in Frankie Landau-Banks’s character. What led her to do what she did: things she would later view with a curious mixture of hubris and regret.

The third-person narration is pure genius. It gives the novel a sense of foreboding, as we ponder Frankie’s brilliant scheming that will lead her to such infamy and memoir-exploration.

Frankie is a female protagonist unlike any other. She is clearly brilliant, but swamped by her feelings of female inferiority in a school previously overrun by men. Frankie is a planner and schemer, with a sharp mind and unlimited cunning. She is also a girl in love for the first time. It’s interesting to read and observe Frankie’s conflict, between her clear brilliance and her need to pander to Matthew’s affections. It’s clear early on in the story what Frankie’s journey will be. Lockhart is writing a girl’s first encounters with sexism and the antidote of feminism. But it never felt like these high-ideals were shoved down readers throats . . . I also appreciated the fact that themes of sexism and feminism aren’t exactly your run-of-the-mill YA explorations. Lockhart is offering up something different, but vital for young female readers. I tip my hat to her, I really do.

I don’t know why I’m constantly surprised into liking Printz Honor books. It happened with ‘Please Ignore Vera Dietz’ too, when I was completely caught off-guard by my absolute love of a prestigious book. ‘The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks’ is more Printz brilliance. E. Lockhart is writing a memoir-esque encounter of a girl’s grassroots rise to infamy (starting at high-school level, but no doubt rising to world domination in a few years). Our protagonist is cunningly wonderful as she navigates a man’s world but finds a way to manipulate it from within. I absolutely loved E. Lockhart’s inspired narration, and the vital theme of feminism in this young adult novel. A definite must-read.

5/5