62 pages • 2 hours read
E. LockhartFamily of Liars
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Loyalty and Betrayal Among Family Members
Carrie spends much of the text believing in her family’s persecution of her, unworthy of their loyalty, and easily betrayed. Through their actions, her family shows Carrie that they are loyal to her in spite of their betrayals, and Carrie is left to choose whether she wants to remain loyal to them.
Carrie and Penny’s relationship becomes even more strained when Carrie discovers that Penny is also intimately involved with Pfeff. Penny tries to explain her actions, but Carrie’s sense of betrayal has already solidified. This betrayal breaks something in Carrie: “Penny knew how I felt, she knew how broken her betrayal made me feel [...] and still–none of that mattered [...]. Maybe some part of Penny can tell I am only half her sister” (203). This anger fuels Carrie’s rage, which results in her murdering Pfeff and feeling, at the moment, “I could just as easily have killed Penny” (266). Despite this, Carrie does not harm Penny, and her sisters prove their loyalty to her when they go along with her plan and never speak of Pfeff’s murder again.
For much of the text, Carrie also feels betrayed by her father, Harris. When she learns that he is not her biological father, she uncovers an added betrayal: “My weak jaw [...] now restructured into beauty…my father wanted to fix me so that I looked like him [...] telling me I had no choice” (150). To Carrie, this is another betrayal, another example of how she does not belong in her family. Carrie feels this way until Harris reveals that he disposed of the dock board that Carrie used to murder Pfeff. Harris knows something truly dark about what his daughters are capable of, and yet he states, “This family is important to me [...]. I will do a lot to protect it. And that includes you” (276). He concludes by telling her to “be the Sinclair I have always considered you to be” (276), which effectively closes the case on Carrie’s feeling of insecurity within her family.
Once Carrie’s family shows her that they care about her, the choice to remain loyal to her family is an easy one for her to make. At the end of the text, Carrie decides to try and accept the events of her past so that she may step into a better future. Part of this involves her telling a new story about herself: “Once upon a time, there was a girl whose sisters were loyal to her. Once upon a time, there was a girl whose father claimed her and protected her, even though she was not his own” (295). She no longer thinks of herself as the outlier, the sister that does not belong and is easy to betray. With this, she chooses to stay loyal to her family in return: “This woman chose to stay loyal to her family [...]. They weren’t easy. But she chose them” (296). Despite their complications, this quote illustrates the strength of Carrie’s bond to her family: She chooses them despite these complexities, despite the earlier betrayals, because they have proven themselves loyal to her.
The Impacts of Lies and Secrets
The impact of uncovering lies and secrets has both short- and long-term impacts on Carrie and her family. Throughout the text, Carrie discovers various secrets and lies that members of her family have covered up. By the end of the text, Carrie herself is the keeper of a dark secret. These secrets negatively affect Carrie’s well-being until she learns how to free herself from them.
The perhaps biggest secret Carrie uncovers in the text is that her father, Harris Sinclair, is not her biological father. Carrie discovers a faded photograph in her mother’s jewelry drawer, and eventually, her mother admits that she is the daughter of Tipper’s ex-boyfriend, Buddy. With this revelation comes the uncomfortable belief that “my position in this family is conditional” (140). Carrie throws herself deeper into her dependence on codeine and sleeping pills to help numb herself to this information, harming herself in the process.
Harris eventually heals Carrie’s anxiety about her place in her family. After Pfeff’s murder, Harris calls Carrie into his office and all but tells her that he knows she and her sisters are responsible for Pfeff’s murder. What he does with this knowledge is protect them: “This family is very important to me [...]. I will do a lot to protect it. And that includes you [...]. Be the Sinclair I have always considered you to be” (276). Knowing that her father has always thought of her as a Sinclair, even knowing that she is not his biological daughter, positively impacts Carrie’s perception of her role in her family: “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” (279). With her place in her family affirmed, Carrie is free to let go of the pain she suffered due to learning this long-kept secret of her true parentage. What continues to plague Carrie is not the secret of her parentage but a wrong that Carrie herself committed.
After murdering Pfeff, Carrie convinces Penny and Bess to carry this secret with them for the rest of their lives, not even speaking of it to each other: “We have to just get through this and wish it never happened. We will lie about it extremely well and then we will just forget it. Never think of it. Never talk about it. And it’ll basically disappear” (218). Carrie asserts here that if they never speak of what truly happened to Pfeff, their actions will “basically disappear,” leaving them unscathed.
Carrie does not account for the long-term effects a secret of this magnitude will wreak on her psyche and her relationship with her sisters. Carrie’s relationship with Penny and Bess can never recover from the weight of what they carry between them: “Our bond will always be stained with the blood on our hands. Our sisterhood will never recover. We will always be each other’s secret-keepers’’ (286). Not only this, but Carrie’s relationship with herself will continue to deteriorate as she battles her conscience. She continues to struggle with an addiction to narcotics, only sobering after two bouts in a rehab facility and after promising Rosemary that she is “not trying to be numb anymore. I’m going to live with the sadness and the shame, and actually feel them” (290). But while Carrie does keep her promise of sobriety, she does not heal her guilty mind.
The thing that finally sets Carrie free from the harmful impacts of keeping secrets is admitting what she did for the first time. She tells the ghost of her son, Johnny, and in doing so, asks him “bear witness” to the “worse I have seen and the worst I have done [...]. I do not want such horrors to determine my future” (297). With her long-kept secret revealed, Carrie finally feels like she can step into a new future: “Now that I have told that story, I think I may be able to tell a new story about myself” (295). This new story does not obfuscate what she has done in the past, but it no longer solely focuses on her worst mistake. In allowing herself this new story, she frees herself from her secrets, her past, and all their accompanying harm.
Surmounting Obstacles and Moving Through Hardship
Carrie and her family endure a great deal of grief and hardship throughout the text, in spite of their privilege. Through the events of the text, Carrie learns how to process her grief, surmount obstacles, and move through hardship, while gaining empathy for her family members who grieve in different ways.
For much of the text, Carrie believes herself to be the only one in her family that mourns the loss of Rosemary or thinks about her. She takes on “mourner” (36) as part of her identity: “I was there for my sisters, but we dealt with our feelings about Rosemary alone. Here in the Sinclair family, [...] We look to the future” (17). Carrie implies through this quote that her family has completely moved on from Rosemary’s death, looking instead to the future without thought to the past. Carrie, on the other hand, is “there for” her sisters, holding space for the grief they do not display.
This unwillingness to talk about Rosemary or process their feelings together causes Carrie to believe they do not think about her. Carrie is genuinely shocked when, later on, she learns that Penny and Bess “think about her every single day” (218). Even more shocking to Carrie is that her mother mourns Rosemary profoundly: “Sometimes I feel like I can’t live without her [...]. It’s better to be busy. To be useful. That’s how I get by” (242). Through talking with her mother and sisters, Carrie learns that there is no single way to grieve and that her openness in grieving Rosemary does not signify some moral high ground.
Carrie struggles with healthy coping mechanisms, using narcotics for years to numb the pain of her mourning and assuage her guilt over killing Pfeff. Only after learning that Rosemary’s soul cannot rest can Carrie commit to choosing a future for herself. Rosemary states: “You have to get better [...]. I can’t make you better, but I keep coming because I’m worried” (285). These words profoundly impact Carrie, who promises her sister’s spirit that she will no longer try to numb her emotions but actually experience them.
Rosemary’s spirit helps Carrie to see what she struggled for so long to accept: “I can see that I have a future. And maybe that is enough. I do not love my father’s way of thinking, but much of it has become mine anyhow. Perhaps he and Robert Frost are right on this one: ‘No way out but through (291). With this motto in mind, Carrie decides that the best way to get out of her cycle of self-harm is to choose a path that enables her to move through it. She quits narcotics and, after confessing to Johnny what really happened with Pfeff, decides to tell a new story about herself so that she may live.
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