We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(78)
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Family Tree
At the head of the family tree are Jonathan Sinclair and Marybeth Bridger. They have three sons: Harris, Dean, and Kincaid (aka Kingsley).
Harris and Tipper have four children: Carrie, Bess, Penny, and Rosemary. Carrie has a son named Johnny; Bess has a daughter named Mirren; Penny has a daughter named Cadence; and Rosemary has no children.
Dean has two children: Tomkin and Yardley. Tomkin has no children, but Yardley has a daughter named Holland.
Kincaid has a daughter with Isadora named Matilda, and a son with June named Meer. Neither Matilda nor Meer has any children.
At the bottom right, below Matilda and Meer, the family tree includes Puddleglum the dog.
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Author’s Note
I am a referential writer. Most of my books owe enormous debts of gratitude to literary works, films, and (in this case) games that have influenced me.
In the novel, you’ll see references to Greek mythology, The Odyssey by Homer, and Hamlet by William Shakespeare. You’ll recognize two specific fairy tales: “The Three Brothers” (collected by the Brothers Grimm) and “Cinderella,” which has thousands of versions from around the world—and which I referenced in a different way in Family of Liars.
The games Killer Odyssey and Something Rotten are imaginary, but I owe much to the descriptions of story games in Gabrielle Zevin’s wonderful novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and to the creators of all the real games mentioned in the text. I was also inspired by Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Charlotte Bront?’s Jane Eyre.
Video game historians will note that Luigi’s Haunted Mansion, which was available in 2012 for Matilda to play, is conflated with Luigi’s Haunted Mansion 3, because that’s the one I’ve played.
The Martha’s Vineyard in this book is also fictionalized. Many of the locations mentioned were invented for the story. Others exist but are renamed and adapted for storytelling purposes. My imagination was also sparked by the Vineyard summer home of famed architect Araldo Cossutta, which I was lucky enough to visit. Thanks to Yvonne MacPherson and Nicole Kim for making that happen.
This book is set in 2012, the same year as summer fifteen in We Were Liars. Holland Terhune might well use both she/her and they/them pronouns nowadays, but in that year (although gender-neutral pronouns have existed in one form or another for a very, very long time), they/them as a gender-neutral or nonbinary choice was just beginning to be used in common conversation, and Holland comes from an establishment family with narrow ideas. That’s the reason for my pronoun choice in the novel.
As always, I owe many thanks. In particular, to my editor Beverly Horowitz at Random House for her unfailing faith, her laser-sharp commentary, and her refusal to let me rest until this book was stronger than I thought I could make it; to my literary agent Elizabeth Kaplan for her endless support; to my lawyer Jonathan Erhlich for jacking up everything good and eliminating everything bad in my contracts; to my team of brilliant book enthusiasts at Random House and Anonymous Content, including (but not limited to) John Adamo, Barbara Marcus, Jillian Vandall, Sarah Lawrenson, Ari Lewin, Wendy Loggia, Kassie Evasheski, Ali Lefkowitz and Robyn Meisinger. Thanks to Julie Plec, Carina Adly Mackenzie, and the teams of writers, directors, cinematographers, designers, producers, actors, and crew at My So-Called Company, Universal Studios, and Amazon Prime Video. Their wonderful television adaptation of We Were Liars encouraged me to think there might be another story that would expand the world of the Sinclair family beyond Beechwood Island.
Sarah Mlynowski critiqued an early draft, and as always, everything she said was right. She and Morgan Matson endured a thousand texts about the title and sent a thousand ideas. Gayle Forman was awesome and ever helpful. So was Bob. Jennifer Lynn Barnes very smartly analyzed how best to present this project to the world. Even more pals who helped me think about what to title this thing: Libba Bray, the whole Kantor/Gancher family, most of the Williams family, Sunita Apte, Elise Broach, the Carey/Block family, Chloe Swidler, my whole immediate crew, and anyone who spoke to me in the summer of 2024.
Heather Weston and Conrad Wells make me look good on the internet, which is hard. Hazel helped me with slang and gamer brain stuff. Ivy and Daniel believed in me and listened to me kvetch. My parents and the rest of my family members were generous and awesome, as they always are. My dad is a painter, and the mythologies of his work certainly inspired me, but the rotten families in my books are always 100 percent from my imagination.