A book which shatters our illusions: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, reviewed

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Gabriela Chaparro

While I was reading E. Lockhart’s book We Were Liars, I realized people can't hide who they

really are. Even though they are always pretending, in the end the truth is going to come out. This novel demonstrates how different we behave when people are around, even though at the end everyone is going to find out who you really are.

When I read the title “We Were Liars”, I was very curious about it. Why? Because the only

thing I could think about was, there are a lot of things we can lie about. So what are these

characters lying about? About their private lives? Their family?

After reading the first few chapters I realized how humans are always pretending to be

someone perfect, who have easy lives, all of this just to not be judged by society. Candace,

a teenager who belongs to the Sinclair family, is the main character in this book, and she makes the affirmation her family is perfect by saying “Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family, no one

is a criminal, no one is an addict, no one is a failure”, which demonstrates how we speak dishonestly while having a conversation with someone new.  Therefore I identified with this book, for the reason that most of the time we are pretending about our lives or how we are feeling, and I think that we lie because we're scared that we are not going to be accepted by society.

The lies these characters tell mainly come out in the second part of the book. This affected a lot the Sinclair family, so at the beginning of this second part Candance says “Welcome, once again, to the beautiful Sinclair family. We believe in outdoor exercise. We believe that time heals. We

believe, although we will not say so explicitly, in prescription drugs and the cocktail hour.”

Usually if you hear someone say “we believe” enough times, you start to think that they don’t

actually believe it. In this quote Candance says “...no one is an addict, no one is a failure”. Also, if you hear someone say “no one” a lot of times, you start to think that everyone is a failure. In this quote she talks about drugs and alcohol, and implies that people have already found the truth about them.

This book shatters our illusions because it makes us realize we are always lying to create new life, a new way to live and behave which is the illusion that we always have. What I mean with this is that we create a fake life, to demonstrate to other people that we are perfect and that the problems that we have do not affect us, but that’s only an illusion that we create, since at the end we will have to admit the truth and to accept how our lives are. Like Candace admits at the end “We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”.