Amidst all the chaos in the lives of the three Sinclair daughters and their children, Prime Video’s We Were Liars just randomly and quite discreetly dropped the name “Rosemary.” In the show, I believe it was Bess who brought up the name, not only once but twice. We saw Rosemary’s name for the first time when Bess gifted her father, Harris, a digitized copy of the children’s memories, and later when Bess claimed how she became the youngest Sinclair daughter after Rosemary was gone. I think her words were suggestive enough to give you an idea that Harris and Tipper Sinclair had four daughters, not three. So the question here is, what exactly happened to Rosemary, and why does the family never talk about her?
Book Spoiler Alert
It was Carrie’s sixteenth summer on Beechwood Island when an unimaginable tragedy took place in the Sinclair family. Harris and Tipper’s youngest daughter, Rosemary, was only ten years old when she drowned at the end of August 1986. She was an enthusiastic swimmer who always wanted to stay out in the water later than her younger sisters. When Rosemary went into the water, none of her family members were with her, except for Agata, a twenty-year-old au pair from Poland. However, as soon as the sky turned cloudy, Agata went inside to get sweaters for both of them, while Rosemary stayed swimming out on the water. No one really knows what exactly took place, but the family believed that one of the stormy waves might have knocked down Rosemary and caught her in the undertow. When Agata returned to Tiny Beach, she spotted Rosemary far out in the water, struggling against the violent waves, but even though Agata wanted to save the young girl, she couldn’t. She wasn’t a lifeguard, nor could she swim fast enough to reach Rosemary and save her life. Rosemary Leigh Taft Sinclair left the world too soon, but if you ask me, the real tragedy was that her parents never actually mourned enough for their lost daughter. And you may want to know why.
As per the prequel book in the We Were Liars sequel book, Carrie, the eldest daughter of the Sinclair family, was most affected by the death of her youngest sister, but she wasn’t able to contemplate why her family didn’t grieve for what they had lost. Well, the thing is, the Sinclairs didn’t like to delve into the past or even let an ugly truth put a blot on their perfect lives. They had built around them a kingdom of well-crafted lies so nothing could ever cause them any harm. They were too happy celebrating their fairy-tale lives, with occasional events and hunts, and kept themselves so busy that they wouldn’t have time to think about anyone’s pain and suffering, not even their own. Just two weeks after Rosemary’s death, Penny, Carrie, and Bess returned to their boarding school, as if nothing had happened.
The book didn’t really explain this point, but I believe Harris buried the dark secret of his family because he didn’t want the world, especially the tabloids, to get a whiff of the fact that the Sinclairs had lost a member of their family due to sheer negligence. His obsession with “building” an image in the public eye had been visited multiple times throughout the first season of Prime Video’s We Were Liars. And now when you know how Harris lost a daughter in the past, you might understand why he was shaken to the core and turned all white when he found out that Carrie’s youngest, Will, had taken a boat out to sea during the storm. He believed that the past was repeating itself again. And in a way, the past did repeat itself, though Will wasn’t the victim, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat were.
Speaking of Tipper, I think Rosemary’s tragic death had been pretty difficult for her, because she was her mother. But Tipper never actually mourned her daughter’s death in public or in front of her other daughters, because she had to hold herself together to save her whole family from falling into a pit of grief and despair. If I remember correctly, it was Tipper’s idea to have these random celebrations at their beach house, and now when I look at these occasions, I think Tipper just wanted to keep her family busy so they stay together and never speak about the horrors of the past. Though personally I think one cannot move on in life or overcome a tragedy by completely erasing it from their life. Rosemary was their daughter, and they could have at least remembered her every year on her death anniversary. I think the next generation really deserves to know about the family member who left the world too soon. I think it is through these little celebrations that we remember the people we have lost, but the Sinclairs do no such thing for the dead. They just tore her page from the book and burned it away, pretending it never happened.
The second season of Prime Video’s We Were Liars will further explore the character of Rosemary and how exactly Carrie struggled with the loss of her younger sister. Why did she keep remembering her long after Rosemary was gone, and what implications did it have on her already conflicted life? Also, if you have questions related to Rosemary or the series in general, feel free to drop a comment in the box below.
