Reader beware: This story contains spoilers for both the book and series adaptation of “We Were Liars.”
Gen Z’s favorite COVID read has made it to the silver screen.
“We Were Liars” by E. Lockhart was published in 2014 but saw a sales resurgence in 2020 thanks to cooped-up YA readers and the wildfire spread of BookTok. Now, fans can see the psychological thriller as a series on Amazon’s Prime Video.
“We Were Liars” follows the affluent Sinclair family who summer every year on Beechwood, a fictional island off of Martha’s Vineyard. Cadence “Cady” Sinclair, her cousins Mirren and Johnny and family friend Gat are inseparable each year, especially as Cady and Gat begin to fall in love. Everything changes after a tragedy one summer, leaving Cady with a traumatic brain injury and memory loss. This novel is her quest to piece together how things fell apart.
“We Were Liars” is a faithful screen adaptation, though there are a few key changes. Here are the biggest differences from the book.
‘We Were Liars’ series condenses book timeline to summers 16 and 17
The most pronounced change in the “We Were Liars” series is the timeline. While the book takes place across several summers, the adaptation condenses the action to summers 16 and 17 (the age Cady is that particular year).
In the book, Cady and Gat begin to fall in love during summer 14. Grandmother Tipper Sinclair dies before summer 15, the year Cady’s accident occurs. After her injury, Cady is kept from the island for a full year, instead traveling to Europe with her dad. She returns to find out what happened to her in summer 17.
In the TV series, the story is split into a precise “before” and “after” – all of the main action, including Tipper dying, the love story and the accident, occurs in summer 16. In summer 17, Cady returns to the island and tries to fill in her missing memories.
In ‘We Were Liars’ series, Johnny is gay, hiding school drama
Eagle-eyed “Hunger Games” fans will recognize 20-year-old Joseph Zada as the recently announced actor set to portray Haymitch Abernathy in the upcoming film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ “Sunrise on the Reaping.”
In “We Were Liars,” Zada plays Johnny, the snarky cousin and son of Carrie, one of the patriarch Harris Sinclair’s daughters.
Zada lives up to the mischievous troublemaker in Lockhart’s book. And though his sexuality and relationships aren’t discussed in the book, the Prime Video series makes it clear that Johnny is gay – he has a brief but refreshingly unceremonious coming out moment (his cousins are supportive) and has a few hookups throughout the series. He tries to tell his mom that he’s gay, but she dismisses him curtly.
Another added element to his character is trouble at private school. Cady finds out Johnny was threatened by a prep school boy, and got into a violent fight at school that left a boy hospitalized. His mother, Carrie, paid off everyone involved to forget the incident, but not after an ultimatum from Harris – if he was going to give her the money she needed, she would have to break up with her boyfriend Ed. Ed, who is Indian, was never accepted by racist Harris, despite being a part of Beechwood family summers for a decade.
Carrie’s desperation to protect her son no matter the cost adds another layer to the sisters’ fight to get their share of the inheritance.
Cady confronts grandfather over racism, Sinclair privilege
Harris’ racism is present in both the book and the show, especially as Cady gets more involved with Gat, Ed’s nephew.
In the book, she calls him out over a racist comment and his illegal ivory, but she’s easily placated after he yells at her for telling him what to do with his money and possessions. But in the show, Cady takes a more active stance in confronting her grandfather’s problematic comments on several occasions, much to the chagrin of her mother. She also makes an active effort to learn about her privilege and undo her ignorance after Gat calls her on it, reading “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson in one scene.
Mirren and mother Bess get new, messy romances
We don’t learn much about the personal lives of the three sisters in the book, other than that they’re all divorced. “Family of Liars,” the series’ prequel, goes deeper into that generation. But the series spends more time on the sisters, especially Bess (Mirren’s mother), who is not divorced in the series but has a fraught relationship with her largely absent husband. In summer 16, she has a steamy affair with “Salty Dan,” the harbor service worker. Mirren discovering them together fuels her anger toward her mother. Penny, Cadence’s mom, uses Bess’ affair against her to leverage an advantage in the inheritance fight.
Mirren has a seafarer summer tryst of her own. In the book, she brags about a relationship with a “Drake Loggerhead,” only to reveal to Cady later that she’s lying to impress her. In the series, Mirren starts summer 16 sexting a pretentious prep school boy, who is revealed to be using her to anger Johnny. She finds something more authentic in a smooth-talking water taxi driver later in the series.
Sinclair sisters tease second season, key plot of ‘Family of Liars’
If the twist ending of “We Were Liars” underscores anything, it’s that there’s more to come.
The Sinclair sisters reference their late sister Rosemary, a fourth daughter who died when she was young. Harris never stopped mourning her, affecting his relationships with his living daughters. Rosemary is a part of Lockhart’s universe but isn’t mentioned until the prequel “Family of Liars.”
The sisters also mention their own summer 16, when something unforgivable happened. Mourning the death of her own daughter in the finale, Bess worries that the Beechwood tragedy is “punishment” for “what we did.”
Season 1 ends as Cady realizes she is the sole survivor of the fire she and her cousins set – she’s been speaking with their ghosts all summer 17. She relinquishes them to the beyond, but Carrie still clings to her son Johnny’s ghost. Season 2 will likely pick up with Johnny stuck, hurting, in the in-between.
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.
