76. E. LOCKHART: Turning 'We Were Liars' from book to TV show

E. Lockhart's most famous novel is a YA mystery, "We Were Liars". Now, it's coming to life as a TV show adaptation from Prime Television, plus getting deluxe editions, a new audiobook voiced by the show's star Emily Alyn Lind, and a third book in the series. We're diving into it all in this episode of LiteraryHype Podcast.

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We Were Liars
Family of Liars
We Fell Apart
Genuine Fraud

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We Were Liars
Family of Liars
We Fell Apart
Genuine Fraud

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We Were Liars
Family of Liars
We Fell Apart
Genuine Fraud

Transcript

00;00;05;23 - 00;00;22;27
Speaker 1
Hi and welcome to Literary Hype. I am Stephanie, you're literary hype woman. And I'm so excited about this conversation because we are not just talking about books. We also get to talk about a brand new TV show on prime television. Today's author conversation features Ed Lockhart who is the author of We Were Liars with this book and book.

00;00;22;27 - 00;00;40;20
Speaker 1
Two of the series just came back out in paperback deluxe edition with Spread Edges, which we are all loving. We were like, This is now a TV show on prime television. And so we're talking all about that. And it turns out I kind of had a head start on knowing about the show, but I didn't realize until the night before we did this interview.

00;00;40;29 - 00;00;45;13
Speaker 1
But we aren't just talking about these two books. She's also got one coming out.

00;00;45;25 - 00;00;48;18
Speaker 2
Later this year called We Fall Apart, which is also in this universe.

00;00;48;18 - 00;00;51;03
Speaker 1
So we're getting all the tea from Elkhart.

00;00;56;16 - 00;01;13;11
Speaker 2
Hi. Hi. Welcome to Literary Hype. It's so exciting to get to talk to you about. You've got a lot to talk about right now. I do you've got a TV show that's about to hit, which I was thinking about it, and I think Julie Plec spilled the beans to me before it was officially announced.

00;01;13;17 - 00;01;15;06
Speaker 3
You got a Julia Plec scoop? Yes.

00;01;15;06 - 00;01;24;15
Speaker 2
Because I asked her what other books when she was promoting Vampire Academy, what other white book she wanted to adapt. And she was like, I just got the rights and it was at New York Comic-Con two and a half years ago.

00;01;24;15 - 00;01;30;11
Speaker 3
Oh, yeah. We had phone calls or Zoom or whatever, where she was in Spain on the set of Vampire Academy.

00;01;30;25 - 00;01;38;29
Speaker 2
So what's it like for you to now? This has been like adaptations take a long time to finally be on the cusp of people seeing this project.

00;01;39;07 - 00;02;03;22
Speaker 3
We filmed, We Were Liars, basically a year ago, plus. And so it's been, you know, this gradual process of seeing the show come together. I'm an executive producer on the show with Julie Plec and Karina Adley Mackenzie showrunning. And so I got to be part of post-production as well as part of, you know, the process of of shooting the show.

00;02;04;05 - 00;02;24;05
Speaker 3
And I loved the post-production process so much because, you know, as you see the songs slot in and the editing takes shape and the love story kind of get brought out and the plot twists get, you know, fine tuned, it really just kind of all comes into focus in this really exciting way. So I'm psyched to have people see it.

00;02;24;08 - 00;02;27;26
Speaker 2
What made Julie the right person to lead this show?

00;02;28;10 - 00;02;56;10
Speaker 3
Well, I mean, Julie and Korina have both made many, many, many, many seasons of super binge worthy television. If people don't know, Julie is the creator of Vampire Diaries and the Originals and Legacies and Vampire Academy, and Karina is the show runner for Roswell, New Mexico's first two seasons. And so first of all, just they make really good television.

00;02;57;13 - 00;03;14;28
Speaker 3
Second of all, there's a lot of overlap with the audience but third of all, they love the book they both had read We Were Liars multiple times when I first met with them, and they had a really deep understanding of the characters and the world and the themes, and they knew what kind of show they wanted to make.

00;03;15;06 - 00;03;22;14
Speaker 2
What's it like for you as a creator to hand your creative baby off to someone else and give them kind of control of your story?

00;03;22;23 - 00;03;36;26
Speaker 3
I mean, the book is always going to be the book, do you know what I mean? So for me, it's just exciting to see a different version of the same story. You know, it's mind and it's not mine, and that's that's the adventure of it.

00;03;37;00 - 00;03;57;20
Speaker 2
And you wrote the the finale of Season one I did. What was it like for you going from writing books to now? Because writing and a TV show is a cooperative, a thing like working with other people. So going from this solitary thing of creating these characters into working with other people on how your characters are going to react in a slightly different world.

00;03;57;28 - 00;04;30;04
Speaker 3
I think I just relaxed into it. I had written some TV before, just not TV that had been filmed. You know, I'd written pilots in this case. I came in and I wrote an outline together with the group of writers who were writing the show, and we shaped the structure of the outline of the finale. And then I went home and wrote the actual episode after shaping that structure, but it just felt like a transposition, you know, kind of into somebody else's vision.

00;04;30;04 - 00;04;33;23
Speaker 3
But that didn't feel bad. That felt like fun. A collaborative.

00;04;34;15 - 00;04;38;06
Speaker 2
Is there a moment that you're most excited for people to see come to life?

00;04;38;17 - 00;04;44;16
Speaker 3
Well, I'm excited for people to see the ending of this story, but I cannot talk about that.

00;04;45;08 - 00;04;45;28
Speaker 2
Sustainable.

00;04;46;11 - 00;05;27;27
Speaker 3
There's a moment that the story is partly about a love story between two young people who first meet when they're eight years old and then fall in love when they're teenagers. And there's a beautiful, beautiful moment when they first make friends as eight year olds and it is filmed so exquisitely and has so many resonances for their their love story, like the way that you see their hands connect and you can see the backs of their hands and you can see they're in a boat house and you can see these gas cans in the background and and the actors are just exquisite who play the young characters.

00;05;28;07 - 00;05;39;13
Speaker 3
And all of that feels very resonant once you've watched the whole show. And so I'm really excited for people to see how it's kind of threads through as a kind of pivotal initial moment of these two characters finding each other.

00;05;39;16 - 00;05;49;21
Speaker 2
Book adaptations aren't always exactly what we read in the book. Are there any changes that you have that you've made through the show that you're like, Oh, I wish I would have thought of that?

00;05;49;25 - 00;06;12;09
Speaker 3
We Were Layers is about a family, a white, old money Democratic family who own a private island off the coast of Massachusetts, the Sinclair family and into the Sinclair family come Gat and his uncle Ed, and they start spending the summers on this island with this family and got an air. New Yorkers, they're middle class and they're Indian of Indian descent.

00;06;12;27 - 00;06;37;06
Speaker 3
And so in many ways, they are outsiders to the family, and yet they are also brought into the family. And when Julie and Karina created a writer's room for We Were Layers, they brought in for writers of Indian heritage who had all kinds of wonderful skills. I mean, they were amazing writers of drama and comedy and young adult stories and had all kinds of wonderful experience.

00;06;37;06 - 00;06;55;16
Speaker 3
But they also had lived experience that they brought to those characters that I never could have, you know, I mean, it wasn't that I wished I could have written that because I couldn't have written that. But those characters are fleshed out and developed in some lovely, deep, nuanced ways that I think my readers will be really excited to see.

00;06;55;29 - 00;07;01;01
Speaker 2
The actor who's playing that is going to be new to the world. Pretty much, yes.

00;07;01;01 - 00;07;01;24
Speaker 3
It was brand new.

00;07;01;28 - 00;07;07;26
Speaker 2
What's it like getting to not just bring a new audience to your books, but to new actors?

00;07;08;17 - 00;07;33;17
Speaker 3
Well, there are four teenage characters and we were liars, and the character of Gad is played by Siobhan Mahesh Hari, who is a completely unknown actor. He graduated college the week before he came to work for us, and he had never worked professionally as an actor before. And he is he's really funny, he's gorgeous, he's really emotional and vulnerable.

00;07;33;20 - 00;07;56;10
Speaker 3
And honest in this in this role. I think people are just going to be stunned. They're going to be like, who? You know, our other actors have been and stuff. Emily Allen Lynch, who plays Cadence as in Ghostbusters, and she's was in the Gossip Girl reboot and Esther McGregor was in Baby Baby Girl, and Joseph Zada was in the TV show Invisible Boys, and he's going to be Haymitch in The Hunger Games.

00;07;56;11 - 00;07;57;03
Speaker 2
So exciting.

00;07;57;09 - 00;08;03;07
Speaker 3
People are sort of they know who those actors are, if they follow that kind of thing. But Siobhan will be new to everybody.

00;08;03;07 - 00;08;04;29
Speaker 2
Emily is also doing the audiobook.

00;08;05;17 - 00;08;12;21
Speaker 3
Yes. Emily Leonard recorded the audiobook for We Were Liars, and it's going to be released May 20th with her recording.

00;08;13;01 - 00;08;24;26
Speaker 2
So what's it like getting in? Like the books are getting deluxe editions now with the gorgeous spread edges. So what's it like getting these books, getting to see these books have new life in the audio and deluxe formats.

00;08;25;05 - 00;08;59;07
Speaker 3
I mean, I think when you're a writer, you just you just hope that you're going to tell a story and people are going to hear the story, read the story, listen to the story, talk about the story. Sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn't, you know? And you have to just be involved in your own creative process. But it's completely like, you know, like a sun with whipped cream and cherry and chocolate fudge on top when when you have a big audience and we were liars, definitely as my most successful book in terms of, you know, having readers.

00;08;59;07 - 00;09;00;17
Speaker 3
So yeah, I feel like.

00;09;01;02 - 00;09;09;04
Speaker 2
It's a Sunday. That's a really fun way to think of it, like it's already out there and it did well. So that's it's already great, but now it's reaching new.

00;09;09;04 - 00;09;09;21
Speaker 3
People and a.

00;09;09;23 - 00;09;10;23
Speaker 2
New generation that.

00;09;10;24 - 00;09;14;03
Speaker 3
Yeah. And yeah, I don't like cherries on my ice cream, but.

00;09;14;09 - 00;09;15;26
Speaker 2
Oh, that's so sad. Yeah.

00;09;15;29 - 00;09;16;17
Speaker 3
You like a cherry?

00;09;16;17 - 00;09;24;10
Speaker 2
I like to. I like cherries. Yeah, like Starbucks just did the cherry powder and I would put it in a vanilla frappuccino. It would be like cherry ice cream.

00;09;24;10 - 00;09;25;29
Speaker 3
Oh, no, that was delicious.

00;09;25;29 - 00;09;26;08
Speaker 2
No.

00;09;26;20 - 00;09;27;06
Speaker 3
No, thank.

00;09;27;07 - 00;09;38;18
Speaker 2
You. Well, you and my husband can agree that he doesn't like fruit at all. Anyways, but with the topic of your books, you've got another book in this world coming out in the fall to which I just got my hands on. I'm so excited.

00;09;38;19 - 00;09;52;11
Speaker 3
Thank you. Yes, the third book in the world of We Were Liars is called We Fell Apart. It comes out November 20. 25. So the books go We Were Liars, Family of Liars, and then we fell apart.

00;09;52;17 - 00;09;57;22
Speaker 2
So what's this story about? So that we have an idea of where we're diving in on this book.

00;09;58;05 - 00;10;22;21
Speaker 3
Well, we fell apart. Happens simultaneously. With We Were Liars in terms of the time frame. And it's about a girl named Matilda who hears from her long lost father. She's never known her father. And he turns out to be a famous artist like a super famous painter. And she never knew anything about him. And she's at a strange time in her life.

00;10;22;21 - 00;10;47;13
Speaker 3
She's just graduated high school, and she's really at loose ends. And she flies across the country to meet him. And she shows up at this enormous, beautiful castle on the sea on Martha's Vineyard, right across the road from not the road right across the sea from Beechwood Island. Where We Were Liars is set. Anyway, her father's not there in this house, in this castle house.

00;10;48;11 - 00;11;06;13
Speaker 3
He's gone on a trip, but there are three cute boys there. One of them is her half brother and two others who are staying at the house. And she has this very intense summer connection with these boys while she waits for her father to get home, to get home and tries to solve the mystery of there's a lot of mysteries in this castle.

00;11;06;19 - 00;11;08;29
Speaker 3
Everybody's keeping a lot of secrets as they do and.

00;11;08;29 - 00;11;10;05
Speaker 2
As they do in castles.

00;11;10;05 - 00;11;20;25
Speaker 3
As they do in castles. Right. So there's a love story. There's a lot of dark secrets. And I can't say too much about what's going on on Beechwood Island, but some bad things have happened over there.

00;11;21;00 - 00;11;26;08
Speaker 2
Ooh. So what made this the story? To return to this world for you?

00;11;26;16 - 00;11;39;23
Speaker 3
This is just the story I thought of. You know, I cannot calculate in terms of like, oh, the market wants this for me, or I should deliver this reading experience or anything. I was like, I got an idea. And then I wanted to tell the story.

00;11;39;27 - 00;11;44;26
Speaker 2
And it's your party. You refer to this as a series and not a trilogy. So does that mean there are more books coming in this world?

00;11;45;16 - 00;11;46;11
Speaker 3
Oh, maybe.

00;11;48;06 - 00;11;54;07
Speaker 2
I don't know. It's weird to have meeting so little little details. I was like, Is that a hint?

00;11;55;11 - 00;11;56;27
Speaker 3
No, I don't know the answer to that.

00;11;57;09 - 00;12;00;02
Speaker 2
Something that came up at your party, what I'm talking about, we were.

00;12;00;02 - 00;12;00;20
Speaker 3
At a party.

00;12;00;22 - 00;12;01;14
Speaker 2
We had a party. It was.

00;12;01;14 - 00;12;02;18
Speaker 3
Great. It was yesterday.

00;12;04;06 - 00;12;22;21
Speaker 2
You talked about how you don't feel like Cadence is an unreliable narrator. Yes. And the difference between keep not telling the truth because you don't know what's the truth versus intentionally being unreliable. So talk a little bit about crafting a character that just doesn't fully know what's going on.

00;12;23;00 - 00;12;51;12
Speaker 3
Well, we were liars. Cadence has spent every summer, summer after summer on this private island with her two cousins who are her same age and got this boy that I talked about earlier. So the four of them are called the liars. And the summer that she and gat fall in love with each other, she wakes up one night in the middle of the night, washed up on the shore of the beach wearing only her underwear.

00;12;51;26 - 00;13;13;14
Speaker 3
And she seems to have gone swimming at night and and maybe hit her head. And she's like, you know, freezing cold. And she ends up going to the hospital. And they diagnosed her with a traumatic brain injury. Because she cannot remember how she got there. And she cannot, in fact, remember large portions of the summer leading up to this accident.

00;13;13;14 - 00;13;47;11
Speaker 3
So she doesn't know why she was swimming alone on the beach. She doesn't know anything about that. And so it's an amnesia story, right? The question is, I'm coming back to this island. My boyfriend stopped talking to me. He doesn't seem to love me anymore. My cousins seem mad at me. I must have done something terrible. But now I'm finally after you know, two years of chronic illness as a result of this accident, going back to the island to see these people again and to uncover the mystery of what happened and and try to heal the relationships.

00;13;47;23 - 00;14;04;21
Speaker 3
So that's her mission. And so she really doesn't know her own story, right? It's really about somebody who's who's searching for kind of the answers to her pain. And so she's telling you everything she knows when she knows it.

00;14;04;27 - 00;14;16;00
Speaker 2
I love that perspective. Switch of an unreliable narrator could be just telling you the truth of what they know. Right. And truth has multiple sides.

00;14;16;02 - 00;14;36;25
Speaker 3
Well, I think any first person story is in some way built that way. Right? I mean, if you read a novel with a first person narrator that narrator is not saying, oh, well, the ending of the story is that da da da da da. They're teasing out the story for you, right? They're not telling you the ending, but they know it because they're telling it looking back.

00;14;37;10 - 00;14;53;16
Speaker 3
So they're taking you along with the perspective of that character, you know, as they experience the events of the novel. And sometimes they might flash forward and say, little did I know, but later it would turn out that da da da da da. But essentially, there's always that sleight of hand going on for the novelist who's writing in first person.

00;14;53;16 - 00;14;56;09
Speaker 3
Right The character knows the ending, and they're not telling it to you yet.

00;14;56;21 - 00;15;00;21
Speaker 2
Do you know the endings and your big twists when you're writing it from the beginning?

00;15;01;04 - 00;15;01;20
Speaker 3
Yeah, I do.

00;15;02;03 - 00;15;03;20
Speaker 2
Yeah. Do you are you a big plotter?

00;15;04;13 - 00;15;15;20
Speaker 3
I'm not a very meticulous plotter, but I sort of map out the big picture things in like broad strokes and then figure it out, figure out all the nuances as I go.

00;15;15;28 - 00;15;20;15
Speaker 2
Awesome. Well, last question we always ask, because this is literary hype. What books are you hyped about?

00;15;21;04 - 00;15;47;19
Speaker 3
We Were Liars is in part a love story and a love story that I really, really liked in the Wise Space recently was Lunar New Year Love Story by Jean-Louis Yang and Luan Pham. And I loved it partly because it brought me it's a graphic and it brought me visually into a world of lion dancing and Lunar New Year celebrations.

00;15;47;19 - 00;16;01;03
Speaker 3
That was a beautiful and complicated, nuanced and messy world. But it just felt like such a treat to go into this world, but also found the love story really emotional. And so I really loved that. I think my readers would like it.

00;16;01;03 - 00;16;06;02
Speaker 2
It's awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking time into all this to talk to literary hype. Oh, yeah, it was a pleasure.

00;16;09;10 - 00;16;34;18
Speaker 1
Thanks again to L.A. for hanging out with me. You always talk all about We Were Liars, Family of liars. We Fell Apart, the print television show. We covered a lot of ground and there's so much to get into with the la carte world, especially coming out later in the fall. If you'd like to check out any of these books or some of Elkhart's other books, the links to do so are down in the description for you, as well as where to find her on social media.

00;16;34;24 - 00;16;43;29
Speaker 1
If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe to the literary podcast. Give us some stories and share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening to Literary Hype podcast.