We Were Liars: Part 1: Welcome Summary & Analysis

The Sinclair family appears perfect: there are no criminals, addicts, or failures, and no one is needy or depressed or unloved. They are wealthy New England Democrats with beautiful blond hair, athletic builds, and wide smiles, despite the fact that their money is running out, and that there are pill bottles hidden in the house. The Sinclairs seem perfect, and they spend their summers on a private island off of the Massachusetts coast.

Cadence Sinclair Eastman lives with her mother and their three dogs in Burlington, Vermont. The summer she is fifteen, her father leaves them for another woman, announcing as he leaves that he could no longer bear to be part of the Sinclair family. Cady feels this like a gunshot to the chest, causing her to bleed out onto the lawn; her mother tells her to get ahold of herself and not show her pain.

Cady and her mother, Penny, pack up all the belongings that remind them of Cady’s father and get rid of them. Then they pack up and go to Beechwood, the private island that Penny’s father, Harris, owns, to forget about the whole thing. Harris Sinclair bought the island for his family: his wife, Tipper, and his three daughters, Penny, Carrie, and Bess. He had a house built on the island for each of them, and now all three generations of Sinclairs—Harris and Tipper, their daughters, and the grandchildren—spend each summer there.

 Cady spends her summers on Beechwood with her three closest friends: Johnny, Mirren, and Gat. They are all about the same age, and the rest of the family calls them “the Liars,” though no one seems to recall exactly why. Johnny, Mirren, and Cady are cousins, and for their first seven summers on the island, they play together but aren’t particularly close. Gat arrives for their eighth summer, along with his uncle Ed. Carrie’s husband left her with two young boys, Johnny and Will, and she soon met Ed and brought him with her and the boys to spend the summer on Beechwood.

Gat Patil comes along with Ed that eighth summer—Gat’s father recently died, and he and Johnny are close friends, so Ed and Carrie think he might enjoy a summer on the island with them all. When Gat steps off the boat onto the island, he and Cady lock eyes for a moment, and without quite realizing it at the time, they fall in love. That summer, the four of them spend all their time together; the following summer, Gat comes back to the island. He also returns the summer after that, until it is assumed that he would be there every summer.

When they are fourteen, Cady and Gat realize how much they like each other. They take a boat out on the water and swim together in the cold water, huddling under a fleece blanket to keep warm. Gat tells her that she is so pretty it is distracting him. They spend more time alone together, walking through the lawn or on the beach in the evenings, and Gat begins to lend her books. They write each other’s names on the backs of their hands, and Cady feels as if Gat belongs to her.

The following year, Cady’s father leaves, and Cady and Penny are busy cleansing him from their lives, so they arrive at Beechwood a week later than the rest of the Sinclair clan. Emotionally raw from her father’s departure, Cady is excited to see Gat again. They haven’t seen each other since the previous summer, but Cady’s feelings for Gat have not changed. She feels pure love when she sees him standing at the kitchen sink holding a dried rose. But as she watches, he puts the rose in an envelope, seals it, addresses and stamps it—the rose isn’t for her, as she hoped, but for another girl. Cady runs from the house, crestfallen.

Cady learns more about Gat’s girlfriend, Raquel, from Johnny, who has met her. She lives in New York, is a modern dancer, and wears a lot of black. Gat doesn’t mention the girlfriend to Cady, but he acts different around her. After a night of anger and frustration, Cady decides to pretend she knows nothing about this girlfriend and act normal. The Liars spend the summer doing their usual activities: playing tennis, making ice cream, sailing, and having bonfires. Cady notices that instead of their names on the backs of his hands, Gat has the titles of philosophy books, like Being and Nothingness. On her own hands, Cady writes “live in today.”

One evening as they sit around a bonfire, Gat raises the question of how it’s is possible to own a whole island, or how anyone can say that a piece of land belongs to them at all. Johnny laughs him off, but Gat continues—he was in India earlier in the year, and saw people living in rural towns without toilets. Johnny responds that Gat has already talked more than enough about his trip to India, and Cady thinks about the fact that Gat is so deeply interested in the world that he cannot imagine anyone finding these discoveries boring. She understands that Gat wants to make them think.

Johnny and Mirren are not interested in what Gat is saying, however, and they tell him to stop talking forever. Angered by this, Gat walks into the ocean in his jeans, and Cady follows him, hoping to rekindle the connection they had the previous summer. Standing in the waves, Cady tells Gat that she doesn’t want him to shut up, and she likes what he has to say. And that when the others told him to shut up, they meant that they love him because he reminded them how shallow and selfish they are. Gat holds her hands and asks if that is what she meant, too, and Cady says yes.

Later that night, Cady can’t sleep, and goes out to see Gat after her mother has gone to sleep. They lie together and looks up at the stars, holding hands. They talk about God and religion and wonder if they are good people and how they should be living their lives. Gat gives Cady his hunting jacket to keep her warm, and Cady wants to kiss him but doesn’t. She thinks about Raquel for a moment but manages not to worry.

The following day, Cady and Gat are in the attic at Windemere—Penny’s house on the island—to go through Cady’s father’s possessions and get rid of them. They are sorting through books when Gat interrupts Cady and tells her to shut up, which has become their code word for saying “I love you.” He then falls to his knees and tells her he loves her. Cady kisses him. At that moment, Harris Sinclair walks into the attic, interrupting the private and romantic moment between the two teens.

When Harris enters the attic, Gat jumps up awkwardly, as all three of them know what Cady’s grandfather saw. Gat tries to stand out of the way, bending to keep from hitting his head on the slanted roof of the attic. Harris warns him to watch himself, and that he could get hurt. He then clarifies that he is warning Gat against hitting his head on the rafters, but Gat recognizes the veiled threat behind the seemingly innocent comment. Without another word, Gat leaves the attic, leaving Cady and Harris alone.

Harris reminisces with Cady about taking her to her first baseball game when she is four years old. Cady knows that her grandfather wants her to join in on the memory, adding in details and turning it into a more significant event than it had been at the time. She notes that this is a common pastime of her grandfather’s: talking about their family of “legendary Sinclairs, what fun we’d had, how beautiful we are.” But Cady isn’t as interested in participating this time, as she is preoccupied with thoughts of Gat—whether he’ll break up with Raquel, when she’ll see him again—and hurries the story with her grandfather. When they see each other again, she and Gat kiss immediately.

Tipper Sinclair dies of heart failure after the fourteenth summer, and when the Sinclairs arrive the following year, the island feels empty without her. She has been a central figure in the lives of her children and grandchildren, and Clairmont, the main house on the island, is filled with memories of her. Cady recalls a photo of her and her grandmother at a benefit party on Martha’s Vineyard, which is one of Tipper’s charity projects. Cady goes into the craft room at Clairmont to look around at the fabric and sewing accessories Tipper used, and the flood of memories make her melt into a puddle on the floor.

Penny finds her daughter in the craft room and immediately tells her to act normal and to pull herself together. She advises Cady that she should never remind people of a loss, and that they all must be strong for Harris. Cady and the rest of the family manage to erase Tipper from their lives, just as they have done with anyone else who leaves their inner circle—including Penny’s, Bess’s, and Carrie’s ex-husbands. They simply act as though these people never existed in the first place.

While the family has an implicit vow of silence, Gat constantly mentions these people, recalling that they did exist and had actually been on the island in the past. He brings up memories of Cady’s father and the quality time they spent together; once, he mentioned a favorite memory of Tipper at a family dinner, and Johnny had to talk loudly over him in order to distract everyone from the taboo topic. Cady’s reaction to these memories is to “bleed” emotionally, and Gat kindly attends to her wounds. But he continues to talk about Cady’s father, and about Tipper, which always reminds Cady that he is not really a part of the Sinclair family.

Cady and Gat spend most of that summer alone together, finding moments during the day or even at night to sneak off and kiss. Gat writes notes and leaves small, insignificant gifts for Cady, and she reciprocates with drawings of the two of them in crayon. He puts the drawings up over his bed, surrounding himself with stick-figure images of the two of them. They find every chance they can to touch each other gently and innocently, enjoying their closeness.

One evening that summer, Cady finds herself swimming alone. She is only wearing a camisole and underpants, with no towel. She has no idea how she got there, or where Johnny, Mirren, and Gat are. Cady hit her head on a rock off the shore and went under, and when her mother finds her on the beach, she is shivering uncontrollably. The adults take care of her and eventually bring her to a hospital on Martha’s Vineyard, where she stays for several days. There are lots of tests and visits from family members, but there is no Gat, Johnny, or Mirren.

At home in Vermont, Cady writes emails to the other Liars, but she doesn’t receive a single response. She wonders if she and Gat are really in love, as previously believed. She deletes her emails from her sent folder and tries to forget about Gat, deciding that it was only a summer fling, and that he has abandoned her in her time of need.

Meanwhile, the process of healing from her head injury is long and slow for Cady, and extremely painful. She suffers from migraines that cause her to vomit and black out, and endures CT scans, MRIs, and other tests to find out what is wrong. She misses so much school that she has to repeat the 11th grade, and drop out of all of her sports, and she loses contact with many of her friends.

Cady’s father decides to take Cady to Europe the following summer: 10 weeks touring Scotland, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Cady doesn’t want to go—she wants to return to Beechwood and see the Liars, and anyway, her father had not kept in touch with her in the year since he left, and Cady isn’t interested in reconnecting with him. But her mother insists, so Cady suffers from migraines, vomits, and blacks out throughout the Europe trip. She also leaves the Liars voice messages and emails in which she alternates between sounding lonely and needy and being falsely upbeat and positive. But none of them ever reply.