The BГ©lier Family (2014)
Cadence Sinclair Eastman is the eldest grandchild of the wealthy Harris Sinclair. Although her family pretends to be perfect, Cadence knows that beneath the surface, wealth and privilege have taken an insidious toll on her family and that any unhappiness or odd behavior is ignored or repressed to perpetuate the image of refinement. Harris has three daughters, Cadence's mother Penny, and her aunts Carrie and Bess. Harris owns an island called Beechwood Island near Martha's Vineyard and has built a home for himself along with a house for each of his daughters.
The BГ©lier Family (2014)
The Sinclairs spend their summers on the island. Cadence and the other older cousins, Mirren, Johnny, along with Gat Patil (the nephew of Carrie's partner Ed) are known by the family as "The Liars". The summer Cadence is fifteen, which she refers to as Summer Fifteen, Gat and Cadence fall in love and begin a relationship.
During Summer Fifteen, Cadence suffers a serious head injury recalling only that she struck her head in the water. She loses most of her memories of that summer and begins to suffer from migraines. She also becomes addicted to Percocet and is forced to repeat a year at school. When she tries to reach out to her cousins she is ignored. Rather than allowing her to go to the island for the summer, Cadence's mother forces her to go on a tour of Europe with her father, with whom Cadence is no longer close to after he had an affair and abandoned the family.
During Summer Seventeen, Cadence is allowed to go back to the island and is surprised to find much has changed. Her controlling grandfather now suffers from dementia. His estate, Clairmont, has been replaced by New Clairmont, a cold architectural monstrosity that has none of the charms of the previous Clairmont. The Liars act strange around Cadence and refuse to talk about what happened in Summer Fifteen. They reject the idea of spending time at New Clairmont and instead camp out at Cuddledown, formerly the estate of Bess and her family.
Cadence begins to slowly remember events from the Summer Fifteen. She recalls that after her grandmother Tipper had died, her mother and aunts began to bicker over their inheritances. Though each woman had been given access to trust funds and education, none of them were able to earn a living independently and continued to depend on their controlling father to ensure their financial futures. Carrie had refused to marry Gat's uncle despite living together for nine years because Harris is opposed to her marrying a man of Indian descent. Cadence finally remembers that in Summer Fifteen, she proposed that she and the rest of the Liars should burn down Clairmont in order to get the family to stop feuding over the property. She is delighted with the idea that she was able to keep the family together until she recalls that the Liars forgot to release her grandfather's dogs, killing them. When she goes to Gat for comfort, he asks if she was able to recall anything else. In a plot twist, Cadence realizes that Johnny, Mirren, and Gat all died in the fire. She goes to visit the Liars at Cuddledown where they tell her that their deaths were not her fault and reveal that they will no longer be able to appear to her, all diving into the ocean and disappearing.
As a child, Lockhart was "captivated" by fairy tale collections her mother had and incorporated a fairy tale feel to We Were Liars; she stated, "Fairy tales have been a preoccupation of mine for a very long time, and for a long time I wanted to write a contemporary story with a fairy-tale structure so I could unpack some of what I had spent so much time thinking about."[5] The relationship between the Liars was inspired by Lockhart's "fantasy" of having close friends growing up, but also an attempt to "unpack" potential consequences of the bond.[3] The character of Gat, who is part of the Liars but also an outsider to the family, was drawn from Lockhart's experience as a scholarship student at private schools, as well as Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights.[3] Lockhart also stated that some individuals close to her experience migraines and she was interested in exploring how pain affects one's personality and perception of the world.[3]
We Were Liars received mostly positive reviews from critics. Kirkus Reviews awarded We Were Liars a starred review, stating that it was "riveting, brutal and beautifully told." The review particularly praised Lockhart's humanizing of the Sinclairs.[12] Publishers Weekly also wrote a starred review, referring to Lockhart's depiction of the family as "astute."[13] School Library Journal reviewer Karyn Silverman said that Cadence's voice was the highlight of the novel, but also praised the "smart" writing in regards to plotting and complex characters.[14] Katrina Hedeen of The Horn Book Magazine also gave a starred review, describing it as an "intriguing, atmospheric story" with a "taut psychological mystery" and unexpected twist.[15] The Wall Street Journal also gave a positive review, noting the crossover appeal to adults and praising Cadence as an unreliable narrator.[16]
Josh Lacey of The Guardian described the novel as "cunning" and "clever", calling the twist ending "nastier and more shocking than anything I had imagined."[17] The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton gave the book four out of five stars, calling it "a mysterious and addictive treat" with a twist that is "dramatic and severe."[18] Meg Rosoff, writing for The New York Times, felt that the execution "fell oddly flat"; she enjoyed the "snappy characterizations" of the privileged family, but felt that overall the novel was not able to fully delve into the personalities of the characters. In regards to the ending, however, she wrote that "Lockhart just about manages to pull it off, thanks to the freshness of the writing and the razor-sharp metaphor amnesia provides for the Sinclair family habit of denial."[19]
The theoretical and empirical framework of identity development emphasizes the role played by important social relationships in identity formation (Beyers & Goossens, 2008; Erikson, 1968; Trost et al., 2020), i.e., relationships with family, friends, or professors (Azmitia et al., 2013). In this context, the role of interaction with parents in the sense of identity developed by adolescents and emerging adults has been well documented. In general, positive relationships with parents support the development of a more integrated, coherent sense of identity among young people, whereas distant or conflicted family relationships are linked with a more confused sense of identity (Beyers & Goossens, 2008; Bosma & Kunnen, 2001; Jackson et al., 1990; Luyckx et al., 2007; Michałek-Kwiecień & Kaźmierczak, 2020; Schwartz et al., 2005; Trost et al., 2020). However, far less is known regarding the roles played by other relevant family members, such as grandparents, in identity development.
However, taking cultural backgrounds into account, in a previous study of ethnically diverse students, activities associated with to mentoring, such as sharing stories and family photos or instructing grandchildren about family traditions, were reported as typical by grandchildren; however, some significant ethnic differences were found in this context, particularly among African-American grandchildren, who were more likely to share culture with their grandparents (Wiscott & Kopera-Frye, 2000). Thus, the current study emphasizes the role of grandparental mentoring relationships in the development of personal identity by emerging adult grandchildren, which had not been tested before and can simultaneously serve as a starting point to examine the model across different cultural backgrounds.
It\u2019s Halloween, a fitting holiday for former Grey\u2019s Anatomy star writer Elisabeth Finch to sit for her first of four interviews since her mask was ripped off seven months earlier. She is seated in a wooden lounge chair so old and rickety that it\u2019s threatening to collapse, perched high above Los Angeles\u2019 Topanga Canyon on a slatted wooden deck that overlooks her sprawling hillside property. She\u2019s wearing a white embroidered dress, a purple shawl and a blanket draped over her lap to stave off the afternoon chill. She looks nervous but appears determined to work her way towards a full confession. \u201CWhen you get wrapped up in a lie you forget who you told \u2014 what you said to this person and whether this person knows that thing \u2014 and that\u2019s the world where you can get caught,\u201D she says in a voice that starts to quaver. \u201CI don\u2019t have to worry about that now.\u201D
In March, Finch\u2019s grandiose ruse, which included a head-spinning web of deceptions that started with a fabricated debilitating cancer diagnosis, abortion and kidney loss stretching back nearly a decade, was first made public in a story by The Ankler after Disney (whose ABC broadcasts Grey\u2019s Anatomy) and production company Shondaland had put one of their best-known writers, now 44, on leave. Even in an industry famous for celebrating and accepting fabulists, charlatans and con artists, the nature and extent of Finch\u2019s lies crossed an unspoken line. No, she hadn\u2019t physically hurt anyone like, say, Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey. But Finch, by fabricating and dramatizing huge swaths of her life story, broke the trust of one of the most successful writers\u2019 rooms in Hollywood history \u2014 and made fools of Shonda Rhimes, the town\u2019s most powerful TV producer, and Disney, the most family-friendly maker and distributor of TV in the world.
Of her time at Grey\u2019s, days where she taped a dummy catheter to her arm and shaved her hair to feign that she was undergoing chemotherapy, she now says, \u201CI really miss it. I miss my fellow writers. It's like a family and\u2026 one of the things that makes it so hard is that they did rally around a false narrative that I gave.\u201D 041b061a72