Family of Liars

“I was there for my sisters, but we dealt with our feelings about Rosemary alone. Here in the Sinclair family, we keep a stiff upper lip. We make the best of things. We look to the future. These are Harris’s mottoes, and they are Tipper’s, as well.” 

In the aftermath of their youngest sister Rosemary’s death by drowning, Carrie laments that her family refuses to process their traumatic loss. Carrie states that while she was there for her sisters in their time of need, the family expected everyone to deal with their emotions and feelings of loss alone, without seeking help or support from others. These expectations are passed down from their parents, Harris and Tipper, who establish a firm code of conduct that the girls must abide by, which includes keeping a “stiff upper lip” and refusing to dwell on the past.

“Now that I am grown, I think don’t take no for an answer is a lesson we teach boys who would be better off learning that no means no.”

Harris forces Carrie to get surgery to fix her misaligned jaw. Carrie tries to refuse the surgery, but Harris does not take “no” for an answer. This quote bears larger implications in the text, as Carrie recalls the events from her summer with Pfeff, who used coercion and a refusal to take “no” for an answer regarding his sexual pursuit of Carrie and Penny. Although Carrie has not yet revealed Pfeff’s fate (and her role in it), this quote foreshadows the events to come, in which Pfeff’s refusal to take no for an answer costs him his life.

“I fix my sisters’ problems. Those are the qualities anyone can see. But my insides are made of seawater, warped wood, and rusty nails.”

Early in the text, one could dismiss this quote as Carrie simply feeling insecure about herself and her place within her family, which has already been shown to be a problem for her. Her choice to compare her insides to “seawater, warped wood, and rusty nails” foreshadows later on in the text when she murders Pfeff using a piece of broken board from the dock. Even when Carrie tells her son her story years later, she still defines herself by the darkest moment of her past.

“Our family has always loved fairy tales. There is something ugly and true in them. They hurt, they are strange, but we cannot stop reading them, over and over.”

Fairy tales are an important motif within the text, and Carrie uses three fairy tales to contextualize and explain her own history. Fairy tales play an important role in her family and relationship with Rosemary and point to fundamental human truths, ugly as they may be. Carrie is under no illusion that her family is perfect, despite their outward appearances, and she does not shy away from pointing out her family’s problematic past and present. Even now, her family refuses to process the trauma of Rosemary’s death, reminding everyone instead to look forward and to keep up appearances.

“No one in this family can see what’s right in front of them.”

Carrie’s cousin, Yardley, makes this statement, foreshadowing later important events. This statement relates to Carrie’s main conflict with her family: They put on an act and pretend to ignore challenging aspects of life. By contrast, Yardley gives up the privileges of being a Sinclair to follow her moral compass. When she discovers her father’s shady business dealings, she tells her uncle Harris and cuts herself off from her wealth and inheritance.

“I walk a path of my parents’ making. I walk it the same way I walk the wooden walkways they’ve made that stretch across Beechwood. I do not see how to step off. If I exit the walkways into the bushes, under the trees, or onto the sand—it doesn’t matter. I am still on their island.”

Carrie explains the challenges of living up to her parents’ strict expectations while wanting a different path. Carrie admits that her life as a Sinclair affords her privilege and opportunity. Despite these privileges, Carrie feels dissatisfied and wants a bigger world than Beechwood Island, and yet she feels unprepared to enter a world outside of her parents’ making. She may resent her parents, but she remains dependent on them. The final line indicates that Carrie sees no path forward that isn’t forged by her parents: Even if she were to “step off the path,” she would still be “on their island,” meaning she would still be in their family and still beholden to their expectations and standards.

“I don’t like Pfeff, but I want to kiss him again. I want to feel clever and impressive, to stroke my fingers along his warm neck. I remember the healing thrill of his kiss, like cold water and raspberries, dispelling the taint of my malformed, infected jaw. I’d like to feel that again.”

Even after the surgery, Carrie doubts her physical appearance and believes she is ugly. Pfeff’s attention and compliments challenge what she has always believed about herself. After an argument, she admits that she does not like Pfeff, but she likes the way male attention makes her feel desirable and attractive. She seeks this male attention, even from someone she does not like, because she thinks it negates the “taint” of her former appearance.

“We never talk about anything [...]. We never talk about Rosemary, or my face, or Uncle Dean’s hookers, or his divorce, or the people with their houses flooded, or the people who have AIDS, or Uncle Chris. We never talk about any of it. We just pretend it’s not there.”

Carrie confronts her mother for the first time over her family’s unwillingness to address challenging things. Carrie cites multiple examples, from Rosemary’s death to the fact that her parents forced her to get life-altering facial surgery without so much as a real discussion about it or its potential ramifications. Here, Carrie asserts herself as someone who is not afraid to touch difficult and painful topics and displays a vulnerable need to reach out and connect with others in a meaningful way that Carrie feels her life is lacking.

“She let my sister have the pearls that tell the story of me. I realize: my weak jaw, my malformed teeth, now restructured into beauty…my father wanted to fix me so that I looked like him. He erased the Buddy Kopelnick in my face, telling me I had no choice.”

When Carrie discovers the truth about her parentage, she further questions her place within her family. She feels threatened when she sees Penny wearing their mother’s pearls because their mother has promised them to Carrie. The pearls were a gift from Harris to Tipper to show that he forgave her for her extramarital affair and accepted Carrie as his own. However, Carrie also realizes Harris’s acceptance of her is conditional: He pushed so hard for her to have the jaw surgery not because it would have any medical benefit for her but rather to change her appearance to be more like his own, therefore erasing her true parentage.

“I want to tell that story to you now, because–well, like the other fairy tales, it may help you understand this difficult thing I am trying to say, the part of my life that I cannot yet put into my own words.”

Before telling the story of Mr. Fox, Carrie explains her reasoning for using fairy tales to contextualize her own story in more detail. Fairy tales often express a complex moral, lesson, or fundamental truth in a digestible and comprehensible way. Carrie uses them as allegories for her life: By comparing her life to the events in fairy tales, she can put into language what she sometimes struggles to comprehend or process in her past. By using fairy tales as allegories for events in her own life, Carrie also distances herself from past events as she struggles to process them.

“I could hack off my own heel with a butcher knife (I have hacked up my mouth already); but it would not be enough to win me love, because still the blood would seep into the glass slipper, telling the world I am worthless, while Penny slides easily into that shoe, puts her hand in his, and takes him from me.”

Carrie struggles with comparing herself to Penny, whom she believes to be the more natural beauty in the family and therefore more worthy of love. When she discovers that Pfeff has been intimate with Penny as well, Carrie recasts herself as the ugly stepsister in Cinderella. The ugly stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to try and fit into the glass slipper, hoping to trick the prince into marrying one of them. Carrie feels like the stepsisters: No matter how much she tries to change her appearance to be desirable (citing her extensive jaw surgery as an example), she still is the second choice to Penny’s natural beauty.

“‘There’s nothing else for you to know. I said I don’t want to talk. I’m sorry you got upset, Carrie, but I told you the truth up front. I’m going to college in four weeks. This is like, a surreal, enchanted summer that I stumbled into, and I never pretended it was anything else.’ ‘It’s not a surreal, enchanted summer,’ I say. ‘It’s my life.’”

After Carrie confronts him, Pfeff tries to displace blame by claiming that their relationship was nothing to him but an “enchanted” summer fling. Carrie reminds him that his actions have consequences. While he may be able to view their relationship as meaningless, Carrie reminds him that his actions have an impact on her life and how she proceeds moving forward. This quote ultimately illustrates Pfeff’s weakness of character: unable to admit his wrongdoings or that he has led Carrie on, he tries to convince her that he stated his intentions from the beginning, and she simply misinterpreted them. This leaves Carrie with a clearer understanding of who Pfeff is as a person: someone who fundamentally does not care about others or how his actions affect them.

“The decision doesn’t feel like a decision at all. It feels like the only path. I am choosing my sisters. I am choosing their safety.”

In her original telling of the night of Pfeff’s murder, Carrie casts herself as the savior to her sisters, who come to her seeking help to cover up their crime. Though Carrie later reveals the truth of what happened to Pfeff, at this point in the novel, she fabricates a story where she chooses her sisters despite her anger with them. In light of the revelation that Carrie was the one who murdered Pfeff, this quote shows Carrie not choosing her sisters but rather choosing herself and her safety. Her sisters are implicated in her crime, and to protect them and herself, she chooses what she believes to be the only path that secures her safety.

“Acting. We have been pretending everything’s okay all year, and we will keep pretending everything’s okay. We know how. It’s the family way. And after a time, it will be okay. Understand?”

Carrie calls on her family’s ability to pretend that everything is fine in the midst of turmoil as she convinces Penny and Bess to go along with her plan to hide Pfeff’s body. As her sisters’ panic begins to rise, Carrie reminds them that acting and pretending is something that comes naturally to the Sinclair family: In fact, they have been pretending not to care about Rosemary’s death all year, so the death of a visitor to Beechwood Island should be even easier.

“His face won’t come up, though. It is like he never existed for me. Buddy Kopelnick is only a scratched-out face on an old photograph.”

In a conversation with Bess and Penny, Carrie realizes they spent a weekend camping with Buddy Kopelnick, her real father, in childhood. The memory is foggy for Carrie at first, and the memory becomes painful when Carrie realizes she cannot conjure Buddy’s face in her mind. This quote illustrates Carrie’s loss: The only photograph she has of her father is married, the face cut out, and she cannot even remember much about the only time they ever spent together before his death. This leaves Carrie feeling increasingly lost and unsure about her identity as she realizes she will never have access to this crucial piece of her past.

“I have to go on. People depend on me. There’s always another pie to bake, or someone needs something. Right? It’s better that way. Your dad needs me, you girls need me, the dryer’s on the fritz or something else is broken. People need to eat supper, every day of the week, rain or shine. It’s better to be busy. To be useful. That’s how I get by.”

Carrie’s mother reveals a rare moment of vulnerability as she explains to Carrie her reasoning for hiding her emotions in the wake of Rosemary’s death. Tipper admits that she feels genuine despair at losing her youngest daughter but remains committed, above all else, to her family. Tipper admits that her hyper-productivity is her way of coping with the loss of Rosemary: She feels she cannot afford to grieve for her daughter openly because life goes on, and there is always someone who needs something from her. To some degree, this quote articulates the reality of Tipper’s life as a homemaker in the late 1980s: She cannot afford to grieve or to stop taking care of things around her because, despite great personal tragedy, the expectation is that she continues to maintain a perfect facade.

“We are trying to go on without you, but we can’t do it. Not really. We’re pretending to go on and everything’s terrible. We are terrible. It’s not your fault, darling Rosemary. Don’t feel bad about it. We just have to–we have to learn how to live, over again, I guess, and it isn’t easy.”

After abandoning Rosemary’s ghost to deal with Pfeff’s body, Carrie pleads with her deceased little sister. She apologizes for her family’s behavior and their apparent dismissal of Rosemary since her death. While she condemns her family’s actions, she also acknowledges that they are trying to “learn how to live” again, which to some degree requires them to move past Rosemary’s death. Carrie’s statement here articulates the lasting pain and anguish people experience after the death of a loved one and how those left behind are challenged to either stop their lives to mourn indefinitely or to find a path forward.

“My job is to make myself believe the story we told, to let that story erase what really happened, like ocean waves erasing marks in the sand.”

In the wake of Pfeff’s murder, Carrie convinces her sisters (and herself) to act as if nothing is wrong. Carrie goes a step further by convincing herself of the story to erase the reality of what she did, a secret she carries with her for decades until she finally admits the truth to the ghost of her deceased son. Carrie compares her ability to erase the reality of her murdering Pfeff to the way that ocean waves erase impressions left behind in the sand. The ocean is an important symbol within the text as it represents vastness and loss to Carrie. After losing her sister Rosemary to drowning, Carrie repurposes the ocean to suit her need to dispose of Pfeff’s body, making it look like an accident. Now, the ocean is the keeper of her secrets, a co-conspirator.

“I don’t think you should pretend don’t pretend don’t pretend don’t pretend don’t pretend Don’t pretend you would never hurt anybody. Don’t pretend you would never hurt anybody.”

Carrie’s guilt over killing Pfeff comes to a head in this short chapter. The repetition of “don’t pretend” over and over again indicates Carrie’s frantic and anxiety-ridden state of mind. Carrie is speaking to herself here: After living a lie for so long, telling herself a fabricated story of how Pfeff died, she can no longer hide from herself the truth or the fact that she is capable of causing real harm to another human being. These lines precede Carrie coming to terms with what she did in her youth, admitting the real story of how she killed Pfeff in a fit of rage.

“It was Pfeff I killed. But I could just as easily have killed Penny. I am Cinderella’s terrible, jealous stepsister. I am the ghost whose crime went unpunished. I am Mr. Fox.”

While Carrie has previously cast other characters as villains (Pfeff as the evil Mr. Fox, for example), here she admits to herself that she is capable of villainous acts. In her rage, she kills Pfeff, but she admits that she was capable, at that moment, of killing Penny as well. Ashamed, Carrie casts herself as the villain from her fairy tales because of her ability to commit murder. By recasting herself as the villain, Carrie admits that humans, herself included, are capable of both dark and light.

“He loves me, I realize. He treats me like I am his flesh and blood. He cares what happens to me, no matter what I’ve done. For the first time since I learned about my parentage, I feel myself completely part of my father’s family. I belong.”

For much of the text, Carrie questions her position in the Sinclair family. In this scene, Harris reveals that he knows that his daughters are responsible for Pfeff’s murder. He confides in Carrie that he disposed of a crucial piece of evidence (the dock board and murder weapon), which shows Carrie the depths of her father’s love for her despite her not being blood-related to him. By protecting her from retribution, Harris solidifies Carrie’s position as a member of the Sinclair family and all of the privileges, responsibilities, and expectations that come along with that title.

“It may be my greatest weakness, this family. But I will not leave.”

In light of her conversation with Harris and the reality of how far he will go to protect her, Carrie claims her family. While she has often been its biggest critic, noting the unethical ways in which her family makes its money, the expectations of perfection placed on her and her sisters by their parents, and their inability to address serious topics with one another in favor of saving face, at the end of the text Carrie makes the conscious decision to look past this. She acknowledges that her family, at times, is her weakness, but she is unwilling to extricate herself from it because she feels that she belongs to them and they to her.

“I can’t stop anything. I’m just a kid. But I keep coming because I can’t stop when you’re not okay.”

For the majority of the text, Carrie believes Rosemary’s ghost visits her because Rosemary feels forgotten by the family. It surprises Carrie, then, when Rosemary reveals that the true reason she cannot stop appearing to Carrie is because of her worries about Carrie’s addiction. Rosemary admits that she does not fully understand why she cannot move on, stating that she “can’t stop anything,” but she continues to appear to Carrie because she knows that despite the brave front Carrie puts on, she is not okay. Through this conversation, Carrie, fresh out of her second stay in rehab, convinces Rosemary that she is working on being okay and gains a renewed sense of commitment to her sobriety so that Rosemary’s soul may finally be able to rest.