Fragments of Life: Out and about: Book Signing with E. Lockhart + Giveaway: Signed Paperback of We Were Liars!

Out and about is a feature here on Fragments of Life for events, book launches and movie adaptations.

This time around, I am sharing my experience about the #ELockhartInPH event.

The Basics:

Who: The author is: Emily Lockhart. The Organizer is: National BookStore.

What books:

The books!

Book Description:

Hardcover, 225 pages
Published May 13th 2014 by Delacorte Press

A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.
Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.

When: March 22nd 2015

Where: National Book Store, Glorietta 4

What I learned about E. Lockhart Frey, her books and her writing style from the event:

Frankie was different in lots of ways better than the author. Frankie is a very difficult person. - executes large-scale and political and funny series of pranks. The pranks end up shaking up the social hierarchy of her high school and end up bringing down the all-male secret society. These pranks took the author forever to figure out, the author had to read tons of books on college pranks.

All her characters have a big part of Emily. Frankie is smarter than the author really was.

Emily basically like to experiment with formats. The boyfriend list has lists. Emily always set herself some kind of structural challenge. In We were Liars, the various tales that Cadence tells are used as interstitials between the stories while not really revealing anything major. In We Were Liars, for the first time, Emily used a different word processor. She used Scrivener, which allows you to see the structure of the book that you're writing from a bird's eye. You can look at the pieces from above and move it around. Emily shared the book with a lot more colleagues than she normally does. She didn't know when people would have the misleading suspicions that she wanted them to have or when they would figure out the plot.

Emily was taught the same way you were taught how to write - to erase yourself. She came out of college writing as formally, as invisibly as a person could be. She writes the same way that she would talk to a friend. The way that you would tell a story to a friend is quite unusual, because you jump back and forth through time, the same way you tell a story, you don't have to make sure that everything is in order. You don't have to be invisible. You just fill them out with what they should know.

Lockhart went to two different high schools: she grew up in Seattle in Washington state and went to the Northwest School of the arts, humanities and the environment. She was just completely miserable in this high school. She couldn't find a friend. She couldn't get into the drama productions. She was so unpopular that people would move away when she sat down at their lunch table. Then she decided to go to a Prep school called Lakeside. She got into the school and she was still the same exact person and nobody had any idea that she was a nerd and a loser. She had boyfriends. She was on the Prom committee. She got into drama productions. She got to experience high school from the bottom and from the top - two radically different experiences, both culturally and socially.

She does not reread We Were Liars. She made the best book that she knew how to make and she's not thinking about it again. We Were Liars had a different style of writing. She was ready for people to dislike the book or the characters because of the style.

She had this idea to write a book about an island, a family, a patriarch with fairy tale. When you have published books, you don't write the entire book, you write a pitch. That was what she did. She met her editors for lunch. She told them: "I want to write a book about real estate." They initially didn't like the idea and suggested for her to write "the sexy stuff" into the story and to include "a thing that happens."

It only took 10 minutes for Emily to finish the plot for We Were Liars while she was waiting in a coffee shop before picking up her daughter.

Emily would like to write about con artists. The next book is not set in high school, and there is a little bit of murder and international jet-setting characters.

Emily likes to write unusual characters who have an unusual voice or way of thinking. But she also always needs to find some points of connection between those unusual characters and other people's lives, human experience. So, in We Were Liars, one of the things she wanted to write about was real estate. But real estate is not really it. It is families fighting over property, and grown children fighting over parental love and approval, and younger kids in the family hearing older people fight and feeling powerless and angry about the way the grown ups are conducting themselves. So, that is an experience that she had and she thinks most young people have had. All families fight, all kids feel threatened when the grown ups in their lives are threatening to dissolve or implode or whatever they're gonna do. That was one of Emily's subjects. All families fight over property and the affection that it symbolizes.

Truism of mystery writing versus writing. In a book or story, when you don't know whats a lie and whats a truth, it gets more interesting. There would be multiple interpretations of what is really going on. The characters are lying for their own reasons and you would know when they are lying but not why they are lying.

Emily and her mom lived in communal houses, with around 15 hippies smoking, meditating and doing yoga during the 70s. She didn't have bookshelves and funiture. One thing that they moved from house to house was a cardboard box filled with books of late nineteenth and early twentieth, beautifully illustrated, bound books of fairytales. It was only much later that Emily found out why: these books were given to her mother by her father during their courtship. She was interested in writing a story We We Liars with objects that were endowed with a lot of family baggage and meaning. She always had that King Lear set-up. Three daughters, one of whom is good, two of whom are bad.

Me and E.Lockhart, my blogger ladies!

Signed books :)

Big thanks to National Book Store for the awesome event! One lucky reader (aka Emily's bookish liar) of Fragments of Life will win a signed (with a message) paperback of We Were Liars. Emily tucked a bookmark in between the pages for you, as well.

So this is open to PH residents only, but if you're based abroad and have a Philippine address to send the book to, you could still join. Enter below!