When E. Lockhart published We Were Liars in 2014, the reviews were great. (It got a Kirkus star.) When the book caught fire on TikTok in 2020, it became a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The equally acclaimed Family of Liars followed in 2022, and Prime Video has just renewed the streaming series based on We Were Liars for a second season. While working as executive producer on this series, Lockhart also wrote a third, standalone novel set in this fictional universe.

In We Fell Apart (Delacorte, November 4),  a young woman with an absent mother responds to an invitation from a father she’s never met. Matilda travels from Los Angeles to a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts hoping to find her father. Instead, she finds his ramshackle castle, a half-brother she didn’t know existed, a stepmother who clearly wants her gone, and a couple of cute boys who have joined the household.

Our reviewer called the novel “atmospheric and emotionally rich.” When we spoke with Lockhart via Zoom, we talked about the role of fairy tales in her work, the value of shared narratives, and the problem of difficult geniuses. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We spoke in 2022, when Family of Liars was coming out, and one of the things we talked about was your interest in heroines in situations of moral trespass. I’m quoting you here: “These are heroines who commit crimes, heroines who empower themselves in dangerous ways.” Matilda engages in dangerous behavior. She’s not always truthful with the people around her. But she’s also the moral center of this story. I feel like We Fell Apart is, at least in this way, a bit different from the earlier books in this series.

I think that’s right. “Heroines in situations of moral trespass” definitely applies to Family of Liars and We Were Liars, but also to [my 2017 novel] Genuine Fraud and to the project I did for DC Comics [in 2021], Whistle.

But Matilda is really just looking for family, and when she travels to visit a father she’s never met, she doesn’t find him. Instead, she finds that his house is inhabited by teenage boys and a deeply ambivalent stepmother. Matilda is being lied to. She is the outsider to the family group, whereas in the other books set in this universe, the narrators are at the center of the family.

I’m sure you’ve been asked this question a million times, but I’m going to ask it anyway: Why do you think your work is as compelling to adult readers as it is to adolescent ones?

I don’t think about that question when I’m writing. I think about telling a story for that young audience. I think about being truthful and emotional and not oversimplifying. I think about giving pleasure to my young readers.

We Fell Apart is a story about a young woman who arrives in a castle filled with cute teenage boys, and it’s summertime, and they go to the beach, and one of these boys is super attractive to the heroine, and there’s an enemies-to-lovers romance.

There are parties and swimming pools and barbecues and boating adventures. I care about bringing young readers into a story with fun stuff, right? I want to write something entertaining that’s going to please my readers and, hopefully, stay with them after they’ve read the book as well.

You know, I hear a lot from mother-daughter readers at signings and other events. It’s pretty common for me to encounter a kid who made their mom read one of my books or a mom who passed one of my books down to her kid. The literary canon is evolving. We’re no longer watching the same thing at the same time on TV. But I really believe that people are still hungry for shared texts.

You incorporate shared texts in the form of fairy tales in your novels. Matilda is a young woman on a quest. She’s not quite an orphan, but she’s leaving the closest thing she’s ever known to home so that she can learn about herself—about her inheritance, and maybe her purpose and her destiny.  

We Were Liars and Family of Liars and now We Fell Apart—they all incorporate fairy tales in different ways, right? In We Were Liars, that heroine is trying to tell the story of her family, but so much of it is unspeakable. So she tells the story over and over with different variations, trying to say the thing that she cannot say, and she tries to turn it into a fairy tale: Once upon a time….

In Family of Liars, there are three fairy tales that the heroine tells the reader, and those three fairy tales seem totally unrelated. But by the end—hopefully, if I’ve done it right—there’s a moment when the reader says Aha! Because all three of those fairy tales hold clues to what she’s been trying to communicate but couldn’t. The role of fairy tales in these two books is similar but structurally quite different.

And then there’s We Fell Apart. Matilda is not the source of the fairy tales; it’s her father, who uses fairy-tale themes in his paintings. Matilda tries to unpack the meaning in these paintings, and their meanings become clearer as we progress through the story.

Finding fresh ways to use fairy tales to tell a mystery story is hard, right? But that’s one of the challenges I’ve set for myself in writing novels set in this universe.

Matilda is a gamer, and she aspires to be a game designer. Video games are, like fairy tales, shared texts.

For the novel, I invented two games based on classic literature, stories that are widely known. One is based on the Odyssey and the other one on Hamlet. The themes in these stories intersect with those in Matilda’s father’s paintings. So their imaginations are running on the same track in very different ways.

For the people reading this interview, if they have kids: Those kids are likely engaged with these texts. And they can be shared texts if you choose to enter into them, right? That’s definitely true in my family. Being able to enter into the story worlds of my kids’ imaginations means a lot to me. It gives us a chance to collaborate. It gives us a shared language.

I’m going to circle back so we can talk a bit more about the environment in which Matilda finds herself when she arrives at her father’s house. She’s a destabilizing presence, but this family was always going to fall apart, right? Because it has an unstable genius at its center.

The idea of the difficult genius―that’s something we see in a lot of fiction. Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice served, in some ways, as an inspiration for We Fell Apart. Everyone Matilda encounters is in thrall to her father, a man who seems to have reinvented himself in opposition to the stories he inherited. But as we get to know his story better, we learn that he was himself enthralled by the way of life—the patterns—he tried to escape.

Jessica Jernigan is a writer who lives and works on Anishinaabe land in Michigan.