*Spoilers for "We Were Liars" by e. lockhart*
Have you ever tried to seem normal when you're actually freaking out because you're in public? Well, you aren't alone. In the story "We Were Liars" by e. lockhart, a girl named Cadence (Cady) has a terrible accident, and she can't remember a lot from the summer the accident took place in. It turns out that she and her cousins Mirren and Johnny, and their friend Gat set fire to a house on their family's private island. All of them except for Cady die in the fire. She comes from a very pretentious family, and they want to seem perfect, but their reputation within the family got squandered by Cady, Mirren, Johnny and Gat. People don't want to seem abnormal for fear of losing others.
In the story Cady's mother keeps demanding that Cady calm down when she starts to panic. When Cady starts to remember something particularly difficult, she starts to imagine tragic things are happening to her, such as getting shot or bleeding everywhere. "'Be normal now,' she whispers. 'Right now.'" says Cady's mother multiple times throughout the book. This seems like Penny (Cady's mother) doesn't want to cause a scene. She doesn't want to stray from that perfect image in her head of her family even after the divorce and accident. Also, I think Penny feels really horrible after the family lost Gat, Johnny and Mirren, and she doesn't want the family to think that they're losing Cady too. She doesn't want to look atypical because then the family might think Cady is leaving them as well.
Overall, people just want to seem normal, even if they aren't. They want to look like nothing's wrong when they're going through hell. People are scared of losing the people that they're close to. I don't think that you'll be exiled if you show a little emotion, but our society shuns emotion even though we aren't perfect. You aren't abnormal if you shed a tear, or even have a panic attack. You're human.
