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Liars
A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.
A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.
When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is until John leaves her.
Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.
A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.
When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is until John leaves her.
Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.
Hardcover
First published July 23, 2024
About the author
Sarah Manguso
23 books792 followersSarah Manguso is the author of nine books, most recently the novel LIARS.
Her previous novel, VERY COLD PEOPLE, was longlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Her other books include a story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction: 300 ARGUMENTS, ONGOINGNESS, THE GUARDIANS, and THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY.
Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her writing has been translated into thirteen languages.
She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.
Her previous novel, VERY COLD PEOPLE, was longlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Her other books include a story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction: 300 ARGUMENTS, ONGOINGNESS, THE GUARDIANS, and THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY.
Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her writing has been translated into thirteen languages.
She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.
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August 26, 2024can't stop reading lit fic about motherhood. help
June 7, 2024
My jaw was CLENCHED this entire novel.
A woman starts dating, then marries, a man. While on the surface he at first appears to be an ordinary level of awful, over the course of their marriage, layer after layer of awful is peeled back, revealing the most revolting, gas-lighting human I’ve ever met (or, I guess I should say, read).
We watch this woman, a talented writer, be put down rather than praised for her successes. And eventually she is reduced to performing the role of mother and wife, when she had always feared being nothing more than that.
This is the story of a marriage falling apart, and what can rise from that destruction. Infuriating, satisfying, addictive.
Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for an early copy, in exchange for a review.
A woman starts dating, then marries, a man. While on the surface he at first appears to be an ordinary level of awful, over the course of their marriage, layer after layer of awful is peeled back, revealing the most revolting, gas-lighting human I’ve ever met (or, I guess I should say, read).
We watch this woman, a talented writer, be put down rather than praised for her successes. And eventually she is reduced to performing the role of mother and wife, when she had always feared being nothing more than that.
This is the story of a marriage falling apart, and what can rise from that destruction. Infuriating, satisfying, addictive.
Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for an early copy, in exchange for a review.
May 19, 2024
There's been a lot of works by women writing about marriage and divorce this year already, many of them concerned with the same conundrum: that somehow competent, forceful women who set out to have a new kind of marriage are stuck in the old kind anyway. LIARS is the best of these so far, in part because it does not spend a lot of time trying to explain.
Jane is a writer who married another artist. She did everything you should do to have a different kind of life, one that is not stuck in the patriarchal cage marriage has been for so long. And yet, that is exactly where Jane finds herself. Living in a house with a child without steady work constantly taking care of all the things John breezily leaves undone. Her husband is no longer an artist, but also he cannot maintain a job. He accepts no criticism while constantly blaming Jane for all their problems.
Every now and then Jane, the narrator, will sit down and write the story of her marriage in a few sentences. This is all the explaining she can do, and you cannot help but see all the things that are missing, everything she chooses to overlook. There are people who will not be able to tolerate this book because it is so clear to the reader that John is a bad husband, a bad partner, not someone you should commit yourself to legally or otherwise. (For me, the first time I thought, "Oh boy she has GOT to get out of this right away" was at 15% in. Yikes.) Many readers will wonder, how does she stay? How can she not see the truth right in front of her? There is a simple answer to this: staying in a bad marriage requires a kind of madness. And that is so much of what Manguso manages here, to capture that madness in a bottle.
Staying in a bad relationship is an irrational act masquerading as a rational one. It puts you in a frame of mind where the truth is actively avoided, where you can only accept these other secondary problems, problems that are not worth leaving over, problems that will get better if you can just put in the work. Leaving is not even on the table, the relationship must continue, this is unquestioned. I have heard many friends describe bad relationships they left and wondered openly how they could stay as long as they did. And I've had people say the same to me about my marriage. It never makes sense, and that is why LIARS feels so true even if it makes you feel like Jane may have lost touch with reality completely.
If you have not had this kind of marriage, maybe this book will not do much for you. But I had my own version and even though it ended over a decade ago, this book brought it back to me more than anything that's happened since. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I really felt it.
Jane is not in good shape. She is not fully honest with herself about her mental health, which is part of why she continues on. There is, fair warning, a moderate amount of suicidal ideation on the page. This isn't a book about abuse, just old-fashioned misogyny.
Manguso writes this story mostly in small pieces. It's similar to Leslie Jamison's Splinters, though far more successful in maintaining tone and arc. Fiction, to be fair, makes some of this easier. But this doesn't feel like fiction. Especially as Manguso leaves comments all through the book that are so biting, so true, that I could have taken a screenshot of every page and saved it. The kindle highlights on this book will be massive. I'm sure it will feel repetitive and dull to some readers, but I finished it in less than 12 hours. (Would have been one sitting but I started it right before bed.)
This is the first time I've encountered Manguso and it's the kind of book that makes me sure it won't be the last.
Quick shoutout to the team for this book that chose Days of Abandonment and Jenny Offill as comp titles. Great job! These are really great comps, actually correct comps, and give readers a good idea of what this book is like in tone, style, and theme.
Jane is a writer who married another artist. She did everything you should do to have a different kind of life, one that is not stuck in the patriarchal cage marriage has been for so long. And yet, that is exactly where Jane finds herself. Living in a house with a child without steady work constantly taking care of all the things John breezily leaves undone. Her husband is no longer an artist, but also he cannot maintain a job. He accepts no criticism while constantly blaming Jane for all their problems.
Every now and then Jane, the narrator, will sit down and write the story of her marriage in a few sentences. This is all the explaining she can do, and you cannot help but see all the things that are missing, everything she chooses to overlook. There are people who will not be able to tolerate this book because it is so clear to the reader that John is a bad husband, a bad partner, not someone you should commit yourself to legally or otherwise. (For me, the first time I thought, "Oh boy she has GOT to get out of this right away" was at 15% in. Yikes.) Many readers will wonder, how does she stay? How can she not see the truth right in front of her? There is a simple answer to this: staying in a bad marriage requires a kind of madness. And that is so much of what Manguso manages here, to capture that madness in a bottle.
Staying in a bad relationship is an irrational act masquerading as a rational one. It puts you in a frame of mind where the truth is actively avoided, where you can only accept these other secondary problems, problems that are not worth leaving over, problems that will get better if you can just put in the work. Leaving is not even on the table, the relationship must continue, this is unquestioned. I have heard many friends describe bad relationships they left and wondered openly how they could stay as long as they did. And I've had people say the same to me about my marriage. It never makes sense, and that is why LIARS feels so true even if it makes you feel like Jane may have lost touch with reality completely.
If you have not had this kind of marriage, maybe this book will not do much for you. But I had my own version and even though it ended over a decade ago, this book brought it back to me more than anything that's happened since. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I really felt it.
Jane is not in good shape. She is not fully honest with herself about her mental health, which is part of why she continues on. There is, fair warning, a moderate amount of suicidal ideation on the page. This isn't a book about abuse, just old-fashioned misogyny.
Manguso writes this story mostly in small pieces. It's similar to Leslie Jamison's Splinters, though far more successful in maintaining tone and arc. Fiction, to be fair, makes some of this easier. But this doesn't feel like fiction. Especially as Manguso leaves comments all through the book that are so biting, so true, that I could have taken a screenshot of every page and saved it. The kindle highlights on this book will be massive. I'm sure it will feel repetitive and dull to some readers, but I finished it in less than 12 hours. (Would have been one sitting but I started it right before bed.)
This is the first time I've encountered Manguso and it's the kind of book that makes me sure it won't be the last.
Quick shoutout to the team for this book that chose Days of Abandonment and Jenny Offill as comp titles. Great job! These are really great comps, actually correct comps, and give readers a good idea of what this book is like in tone, style, and theme.
March 30, 2024
Read in under 24 hours. An astounding feat of narrative management, the book spans a 14-year marriage with concision and specificity. I found it surgically painful, generously intimate. I'm saddened and enraged so many middle-aged women of late have been inspired to write a version of this story. We need a better institution than hetero marriage for raising children and supporting mothers. Also, fuck John! I hate him.
Some choice lines from the book:
I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.
Then I figured it out: My offense was having failed to give him credit for picking up the cleaning after he'd failed to pick up the cleaning.
The prospect of dying while knowing that you are loved, in the company of the other—that's the marriage vow. The core experience of spousal betrayal is having that happy scene torn away from you.
Maybe the trouble was simply that men hate women.
A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.
Some choice lines from the book:
I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.
Then I figured it out: My offense was having failed to give him credit for picking up the cleaning after he'd failed to pick up the cleaning.
The prospect of dying while knowing that you are loved, in the company of the other—that's the marriage vow. The core experience of spousal betrayal is having that happy scene torn away from you.
Maybe the trouble was simply that men hate women.
A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.
August 29, 2024
i personally would have kicked him in the shins and never married him in the first place but that’s just me
August 22, 2024
A portrait of a marriage from challenging beginnings to bitterest of ends. Sarah Manguso’s compulsively readable novel was written in a fury when her husband walked out without warning after twenty years together. It centres on Jane who meets and later marries magnetic, handsome John Bridges. Both are aspiring artists, Jane wants to be a writer, John a filmmaker, for a time their creative ambitions seem to unite them until John’s shifting priorities take him in a different direction. Reading this often reminded me of watching pantomimes as a small child, calling out warnings to characters to look out as the villain approached. Right from the start John is so obviously a walking red flag it’s almost unbearable to witness Jane fall for his dubious charms: he represents his previous girlfriend as crazed and clingy; he borrows money he won’t pay back; he sulks when Jane achieves any measure of success in her writing. As Jane’s life becomes intertwined with John’s, he quickly assumes a position of dominance; his numerous failed career plans take her away from her own promising career, as he ruthlessly moves them from city to city, rented home to rented home. John delights in reading, then rubbishing, Jane’s work in progress, and interrupting the tutoring sessions she takes on to bolster their shaky income, in order to undermine her teaching. In John’s world, only John’s words count.
Yet Jane not only stays with John, she marries him and later they have a child together. She seems to sleepwalk into what’s set to be a classically abusive relationship characterised by John’s particular brand of gaslighting and contemptuous, coercive control. Manguso’s documentation of Jane’s experiences has a diaristic, aphoristic quality similar in tone and style to her earlier non-fiction, sometimes presenting Jane’s daily life in near-forensic detail. The dynamics of Jane’s marriage reminded me of an only-slightly updated version of the relations between husband and wife in The Yellow Wallpaper. Like Manguso, Jane has an autoimmune blood disorder which can be disabling, and once spent time in a psychiatric facility, facts that John has no qualms in using against her. Labelling her "mad" and "unstable" when she dares to question his behaviour towards her, his weaponised incompetence, and dismissive attitudes. As Jane and her child grow dependent on John’s income, he further severs her ties to friends, family and increasingly the literary world in which her growing status threatens to overshadow his limited achievements. All of which Jane recognises but excuses on the basis that friends’ marriages are equally flawed, that ultimately self-sacrifice is what being a wife and mother entails.
From the outside Jane’s apparent acceptance of her situation can seem like wilful self-immolation. But her uneasy acquiescence is a common response to existing in an abusive environment of this nature. As she ruefully remarks she’s in charge of everything, in control of nothing. It’s an environment fostered by a culture in which far too many heterosexual women are socialised to put their needs last, and heterosexual men to put theirs first. Jane’s own mother tells her she simply needs to be nicer to John. This is, after all, the America of the trad wife, a country in which a misogynistic theocracy is slowly taking shape. That’s not to say that Jane’s loss of self, or her ordeal, is a purely American phenomenon. As the global, viral success of Paris Paloma’s Labour illustrates - with its damning assessment of the expectations placed on heterosexual women in terms of emotional and physical domestic labour - Jane’s position is one many women will recognise, even if it's one they themselves have rejected.
It's a fascinating piece, riddled with instances of muted brutality; an unflinching, incredibly convincing portrayal of casual, devastating betrayals; the systematic demolition, and gradual rebuilding of a woman’s selfhood. Overall, an exceptionally powerful, accomplished novel.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC
Yet Jane not only stays with John, she marries him and later they have a child together. She seems to sleepwalk into what’s set to be a classically abusive relationship characterised by John’s particular brand of gaslighting and contemptuous, coercive control. Manguso’s documentation of Jane’s experiences has a diaristic, aphoristic quality similar in tone and style to her earlier non-fiction, sometimes presenting Jane’s daily life in near-forensic detail. The dynamics of Jane’s marriage reminded me of an only-slightly updated version of the relations between husband and wife in The Yellow Wallpaper. Like Manguso, Jane has an autoimmune blood disorder which can be disabling, and once spent time in a psychiatric facility, facts that John has no qualms in using against her. Labelling her "mad" and "unstable" when she dares to question his behaviour towards her, his weaponised incompetence, and dismissive attitudes. As Jane and her child grow dependent on John’s income, he further severs her ties to friends, family and increasingly the literary world in which her growing status threatens to overshadow his limited achievements. All of which Jane recognises but excuses on the basis that friends’ marriages are equally flawed, that ultimately self-sacrifice is what being a wife and mother entails.
From the outside Jane’s apparent acceptance of her situation can seem like wilful self-immolation. But her uneasy acquiescence is a common response to existing in an abusive environment of this nature. As she ruefully remarks she’s in charge of everything, in control of nothing. It’s an environment fostered by a culture in which far too many heterosexual women are socialised to put their needs last, and heterosexual men to put theirs first. Jane’s own mother tells her she simply needs to be nicer to John. This is, after all, the America of the trad wife, a country in which a misogynistic theocracy is slowly taking shape. That’s not to say that Jane’s loss of self, or her ordeal, is a purely American phenomenon. As the global, viral success of Paris Paloma’s Labour illustrates - with its damning assessment of the expectations placed on heterosexual women in terms of emotional and physical domestic labour - Jane’s position is one many women will recognise, even if it's one they themselves have rejected.
It's a fascinating piece, riddled with instances of muted brutality; an unflinching, incredibly convincing portrayal of casual, devastating betrayals; the systematic demolition, and gradual rebuilding of a woman’s selfhood. Overall, an exceptionally powerful, accomplished novel.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC
September 13, 2024
Jane is an aspiring writer and when she meets John, an artist, they hit it off instantly.
They get married, they buy a house, they have a baby boy.
John starts up a company, it fails, they move across country. John starts up another company, it fails, they move again. Over and Over. They move 5 times over the course of 7 years. Meanwhile, her writing is always on the back burner, simmering, just out of reach.
"John didn't just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he'd ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he'd done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement."
All the while Jane is left to do everything. Every domestic task. Everything for their son. All the logistics of keeping a family and household running on course. Correcting things her absentminded husband forgets time and time again.
"I was in charge of everything but in control of nothing."
When she finally gets frustrated enough to snap at him about helping out more, he always responds the same way. You're crazy.
"Calling a woman crazy is a man's last resort when he's failed to control her."
This is a story that has been written many times before yet I never grow tired of observing a disintegrating marriage. That probably makes me sound like quite the voyeur but in actuality it reminds me that the feelings I have had in the past are valid. Sometimes in the midst of an abusive relationship you can't see things with any clarity. Hence the title, Liars, that of the abusive and unfaithful and then those lies of the people unwilling to look and see the truth. The lies we tell ourselves to keep ourselves held together and sane. If I can just pretend I'm happy and everything is perfectly perfect it will eventually become true, right?
Manguso's astute observations on a marriage in decline were sharp as a razors edge. I could not look away from the page. My heart broke many times over but I am still so glad to have read this. 4 stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for my complimentary copy.
They get married, they buy a house, they have a baby boy.
John starts up a company, it fails, they move across country. John starts up another company, it fails, they move again. Over and Over. They move 5 times over the course of 7 years. Meanwhile, her writing is always on the back burner, simmering, just out of reach.
"John didn't just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he'd ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he'd done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement."
All the while Jane is left to do everything. Every domestic task. Everything for their son. All the logistics of keeping a family and household running on course. Correcting things her absentminded husband forgets time and time again.
"I was in charge of everything but in control of nothing."
When she finally gets frustrated enough to snap at him about helping out more, he always responds the same way. You're crazy.
"Calling a woman crazy is a man's last resort when he's failed to control her."
This is a story that has been written many times before yet I never grow tired of observing a disintegrating marriage. That probably makes me sound like quite the voyeur but in actuality it reminds me that the feelings I have had in the past are valid. Sometimes in the midst of an abusive relationship you can't see things with any clarity. Hence the title, Liars, that of the abusive and unfaithful and then those lies of the people unwilling to look and see the truth. The lies we tell ourselves to keep ourselves held together and sane. If I can just pretend I'm happy and everything is perfectly perfect it will eventually become true, right?
Manguso's astute observations on a marriage in decline were sharp as a razors edge. I could not look away from the page. My heart broke many times over but I am still so glad to have read this. 4 stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for my complimentary copy.
August 31, 2024
In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.
Then I married a man, as women do.
This is a searing account of a toxic marriage, told in the first person by a narrator whose survival mechanism is to tell herself stories that things aren't so bad between her and her infuriating husband.
They're both liars but while he lies from ego, from convenience, by entitlement, her lies are more self-protective, a way of accommodating herself to the fantasies that culture still propagates to women: that we need a husband to be happy, that fulfillment comes from motherhood, wifehood and domesticity, that creative and artistic endeavours are some kind of selfish indulgence and that any woman who doesn't know and conform willingly to all this is psychologically sick and deserves to be institutionalized as 'crazy'.
Manguso's prose is restrained but can be shining-sharp, and she writes this in broken up fragments, a little like journal entries, the form of a woman who cannot even find the time and space to prioritize her own thoughts and feelings.
There's nothing radical in the way this book attests to the continued hierarchy of men's needs over women's; the ongoing power dynamic that comes from their superior earning power not least in the face of maternity; the struggle to control the narrative and whose story comes out on top. But Manguso doesn't bypass the complicity of women and the deep-seated desire to conform to the romantic fantasies with which we have been socialized.
One of the clever things about the narrative is the way, as readers, we're almost invited to blame Jane: the red flags are so obvious, so frequent; her husband's contempt so blatant, his power plays of withholding so clear - but one of the provocations here is to make us consider our own complacency and complicity, to empathize rather than to look on and ask why Jane puts up with this and why she doesn't leave him.
The important thing is that this is a frequently told tale and one that goes back through history: whatever progress has been made, there are disturbing continuities in the lives of women and I could almost feel my blood pressure rising living vicariously through Jane's married life!
One to file alongside A Room of One’s Own and Rachel Cusk's Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.
February 3, 2024
“I began to understand what a story is. It’s a manipulation. It’s a way of containing unmanageable chaos.”
I started with that quote since my favorite kind of novel is when the teller is a writer who blends their private life with their writing life, and makes you stop for a minute to enjoy the turn of phrase they used to say it. It's written like you are reading the pages of a diary.
This is the 21st century edition of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (even though Albee wrote a play and this is a novel). It’s equally cruel, more so, because the language is updated for a contemporary accessibility, rather than your mother's and grandmother's one (or father's and grandfather's!). In Woolf, husband and wife were both such flamboyant alcoholics, it matched the times and the way these stories of alcoholism were told—and it mirrored Liz and Dick’s marriage. Does this mirror a former Manguso marriage?
LIARS version contains addiction, but a potpourri of them. The cause and the worst of coping mechanisms for their bad behaviors. Jane and John’s marriage was rife with verbal, emotional, and push-and-shove kind of physical abuse. It was hard to "watch" at times. Yes, Manguso's prose soars right to the rot. She is a whiz at depicting Jane's pain, so alarming that it took the air right out of me.
I hear the “why not just get a divorce” complaint, but, in Jane’s mind, she is staying with her husband for the sake of their child. Biggest reason, despite the cliché. I doubt that anyone who stays for that reason would ever give that advice to their friends, though. Aren't we such contradictory creatures. I think she thinks that, and believes it, but Jane, like everyone else, has blind spots. If she had no blind spots, she would not be married to this man! Of course, the story is told from Jane’s perspective, not John’s. So, there you go. If Manguso is *Jane much?,* or maybe some of Jane, then she-- Manguso--knows you know—it’s pretty naked.
One of the more eerie aspects of this novel is how the child is never named. Various descriptors used except for his name, usually “the child.” The generic names of John and Jane are obvious---there are so many marriages that are like theirs and go on for years. People are scared, financially and emotionally--and all other kinds of dependent. They are afraid of change, or they think that nobody else will love them, and they will otherwise grow old all alone.
But getting back to the unnamed child. I’m still asking myself, and won't arrive at just one answer. Maybe Jane hasn’t acknowledged her son as a separate being yet, an individual apart from her. That she's completely lost if he isn't part of her, and not just genetically.
Does Jane embellish, or say the opposite of what she means? She’s definitely pointed but not always on-point. She can be sly and slippery, that one. But she’s also been living with a man she feels is a sneering, contemptuous, dismissive toxic male. Is he as bad as she says? Is she as righteous in her indignation as she says, or is she playing the martyr? Or a little of both, maybe. I think Manguso, even if it is autofiction, is not asking us to find her fully credible (nor for us to believe that John is nothing but a complete snot).
Jane states John makes a lot of money but is selfish and injudicious with it, too. According to her, he seems to both want his wife to take care of the child 98% of the time, but make more money than she’s making. However, he is a failed artist and Jane is a more successful one. Jealous much? That part is highly credible. There’s also room to question the insufferable pair of them!
Question: why are their cats always vomitus? I think Jane should change cat food brands.
Thank you so much to Hogarth for this galley. It was difficult to read at times, it’s 95% grim. It’s hard to enjoy enjoy, but it was revelatory, however venty, and a book Sarah Manguso needs to get out of her system. She and her Jane have a witty severity. Super jaded—no sugar here at all. And I digested every last bite.
I started with that quote since my favorite kind of novel is when the teller is a writer who blends their private life with their writing life, and makes you stop for a minute to enjoy the turn of phrase they used to say it. It's written like you are reading the pages of a diary.
This is the 21st century edition of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (even though Albee wrote a play and this is a novel). It’s equally cruel, more so, because the language is updated for a contemporary accessibility, rather than your mother's and grandmother's one (or father's and grandfather's!). In Woolf, husband and wife were both such flamboyant alcoholics, it matched the times and the way these stories of alcoholism were told—and it mirrored Liz and Dick’s marriage. Does this mirror a former Manguso marriage?
LIARS version contains addiction, but a potpourri of them. The cause and the worst of coping mechanisms for their bad behaviors. Jane and John’s marriage was rife with verbal, emotional, and push-and-shove kind of physical abuse. It was hard to "watch" at times. Yes, Manguso's prose soars right to the rot. She is a whiz at depicting Jane's pain, so alarming that it took the air right out of me.
I hear the “why not just get a divorce” complaint, but, in Jane’s mind, she is staying with her husband for the sake of their child. Biggest reason, despite the cliché. I doubt that anyone who stays for that reason would ever give that advice to their friends, though. Aren't we such contradictory creatures. I think she thinks that, and believes it, but Jane, like everyone else, has blind spots. If she had no blind spots, she would not be married to this man! Of course, the story is told from Jane’s perspective, not John’s. So, there you go. If Manguso is *Jane much?,* or maybe some of Jane, then she-- Manguso--knows you know—it’s pretty naked.
One of the more eerie aspects of this novel is how the child is never named. Various descriptors used except for his name, usually “the child.” The generic names of John and Jane are obvious---there are so many marriages that are like theirs and go on for years. People are scared, financially and emotionally--and all other kinds of dependent. They are afraid of change, or they think that nobody else will love them, and they will otherwise grow old all alone.
But getting back to the unnamed child. I’m still asking myself, and won't arrive at just one answer. Maybe Jane hasn’t acknowledged her son as a separate being yet, an individual apart from her. That she's completely lost if he isn't part of her, and not just genetically.
Does Jane embellish, or say the opposite of what she means? She’s definitely pointed but not always on-point. She can be sly and slippery, that one. But she’s also been living with a man she feels is a sneering, contemptuous, dismissive toxic male. Is he as bad as she says? Is she as righteous in her indignation as she says, or is she playing the martyr? Or a little of both, maybe. I think Manguso, even if it is autofiction, is not asking us to find her fully credible (nor for us to believe that John is nothing but a complete snot).
Jane states John makes a lot of money but is selfish and injudicious with it, too. According to her, he seems to both want his wife to take care of the child 98% of the time, but make more money than she’s making. However, he is a failed artist and Jane is a more successful one. Jealous much? That part is highly credible. There’s also room to question the insufferable pair of them!
Question: why are their cats always vomitus? I think Jane should change cat food brands.
Thank you so much to Hogarth for this galley. It was difficult to read at times, it’s 95% grim. It’s hard to enjoy enjoy, but it was revelatory, however venty, and a book Sarah Manguso needs to get out of her system. She and her Jane have a witty severity. Super jaded—no sugar here at all. And I digested every last bite.
September 1, 2024
Very mixed feelings. I’ve read six of Manguso’s nine books (all but the poetry and an obscure flash fiction collection) and I esteem her fragmentary, aphoristic prose. On balance I’m fonder of her nonfiction. Had Liars been marketed as a diary of her marriage and divorce, Manguso might have been eviscerated for the indulgence and one-sided presentation. With the thinnest of autofiction layers, is it art?
Jane recounts her doomed marriage, from the early days of her relationship with John Bridges to the aftermath of his affair and their split. She is a writer and academic who sacrifices her career for his financially risky artistic pursuits. Especially once she has a baby, every domestic duty falls to her, while he keeps living like a selfish stag and gaslights her if she tries to complain, bringing up her history of mental illness. The concise vignettes condense 14+ years into 250 pages, which is a relief because beneath the sluggish progression is such repetition of type of experiences that it could feel endless. John’s last name might as well be Doe: The novel presents him – and thus all men – as despicable and useless, while women are effortlessly capable and, by exhausting themselves, achieve superhuman feats. This is what heterosexual marriage does to anyone, Manguso is arguing. Indeed, in a Guardian interview she characterized this as a “domestic abuse novel,” and elsewhere she has said that motherhood can be unlinked from patriarchy, but not marriage.
Let’s say I were to list my every grievance against my husband from the last 17+ years: every time he left dirty clothes on the bedroom floor (which is every day); every time he loaded the dishwasher inefficiently (which is every time, so he leaves it to me); every time he failed to seal a packet or jar or Tupperware properly (which – yeah, you get the picture) – and he’s one of the good guys, bumbling rather than egotistical! And he’d have his own list for me, too. This is just what we put up with to live with other people, right? John is definitely worse (“The difference between John and a fascist despot is one of degree, not type”). But it’s not edifying, for author or reader. There may be catharsis to airing every single complaint, but how does it help to stew in bitterness? Look at everything I went through and validate my anger.
There are bright spots: Jane’s unexpected transformation into a doting mother (but why must their son only ever be called “the child”?), her dedication to her cat, and the occasional dark humour:
Manguso’s aphoristic style makes for many quotably mordant sentences. My feelings vacillated wildly, from repulsion to gung-ho support; my rating likewise swung between extremes and settled in the middle. I felt that, as a feminist, I should wholeheartedly support a project of exposing wrongs. It’s easy to understand how helplessness leads to rage, and how, considering sunk costs, a partner would irrationally hope for a situation to improve. So I wasn’t as frustrated with Jane as some readers have been. But I didn’t like the crass sexual language, and on the whole I agreed with Parul Sehgal’s brilliant New Yorker review that the novel is so partial and the tone so astringent that it is impossible to love.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Jane recounts her doomed marriage, from the early days of her relationship with John Bridges to the aftermath of his affair and their split. She is a writer and academic who sacrifices her career for his financially risky artistic pursuits. Especially once she has a baby, every domestic duty falls to her, while he keeps living like a selfish stag and gaslights her if she tries to complain, bringing up her history of mental illness. The concise vignettes condense 14+ years into 250 pages, which is a relief because beneath the sluggish progression is such repetition of type of experiences that it could feel endless. John’s last name might as well be Doe: The novel presents him – and thus all men – as despicable and useless, while women are effortlessly capable and, by exhausting themselves, achieve superhuman feats. This is what heterosexual marriage does to anyone, Manguso is arguing. Indeed, in a Guardian interview she characterized this as a “domestic abuse novel,” and elsewhere she has said that motherhood can be unlinked from patriarchy, but not marriage.
Let’s say I were to list my every grievance against my husband from the last 17+ years: every time he left dirty clothes on the bedroom floor (which is every day); every time he loaded the dishwasher inefficiently (which is every time, so he leaves it to me); every time he failed to seal a packet or jar or Tupperware properly (which – yeah, you get the picture) – and he’s one of the good guys, bumbling rather than egotistical! And he’d have his own list for me, too. This is just what we put up with to live with other people, right? John is definitely worse (“The difference between John and a fascist despot is one of degree, not type”). But it’s not edifying, for author or reader. There may be catharsis to airing every single complaint, but how does it help to stew in bitterness? Look at everything I went through and validate my anger.
There are bright spots: Jane’s unexpected transformation into a doting mother (but why must their son only ever be called “the child”?), her dedication to her cat, and the occasional dark humour:
So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.
Manguso’s aphoristic style makes for many quotably mordant sentences. My feelings vacillated wildly, from repulsion to gung-ho support; my rating likewise swung between extremes and settled in the middle. I felt that, as a feminist, I should wholeheartedly support a project of exposing wrongs. It’s easy to understand how helplessness leads to rage, and how, considering sunk costs, a partner would irrationally hope for a situation to improve. So I wasn’t as frustrated with Jane as some readers have been. But I didn’t like the crass sexual language, and on the whole I agreed with Parul Sehgal’s brilliant New Yorker review that the novel is so partial and the tone so astringent that it is impossible to love.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
September 24, 2024
I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.
Quem é mais pernicioso? Aquele que mente aos outros ou a si mesmo?
I was proud of our family and of John’s career, so when he played video games all night, spent weekends painting, or stayed out body surfing in deep water while the child and I waited, shivering on the beach, I didn’t push back. I multitasked and made my own needs small as possible because, I thought, I was just more capable than he was. I assumed that made me valuable.
Em “Liars”, Sarah Manguso faz a autópsia de um casamento, primeiro conservado em formol devido aos seus esforços e à sua teimosia; depois, em evidente estado de putrefacção, o qual o seu marido acaba por enterrar, 14 anos depois, quando encontra uma substituta.
When I was young I’d sworn I’d never marry. I’d understood, back then, that commitment was a trap that closed off otherwise accessible exit routes. Then I had therapy for ten years and learned that commitment was a gift, the ability to give you heart to another.
Há casamentos que têm o seu período de lua-de-mel e que só passado algum tempo, com o cansaço das cedências e os desafios da rotina, é que começam a degradar-se, mas não é o caso de Jane que, desde o início, tem não um marido mas, antes, um emplastro.
By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of John’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed. John had gotten up and taken a shit.
Ao contrário do que se possa inferir, esta obra decorre no século XX e não 100 anos antes, mas é através da sua própria experiência que a protagonista começa a entender as mulheres que a precederam.
Tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrank away when my father tried to touch her: she was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of that rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid.
Depois de várias mudanças da costa leste para a costa oeste dos Estados Unidos devido aos inconstantes empregos do marido, Jane, professora de escrita e escritora, vê os seus dias a esgotarem-se em tarefas domésticas, a cuidar do gato e do filho, a tratar de toda a burocracia do casal, usando o pouco dinheiro que ganha para pagar a uma babysitter para poder continuar a escrever e a leccionar e, com a sua remuneração, poder continuar a alimentar o luxo de ter um trabalho criativo a tempo parcial.
I read a book by a woman who had never married or had children. I didn’t think I’d ever have become such a good writer – so, I said to myself, it was all right that the past two days of my life had been nothing but submission to my husband and child. I wouldn’t have amounted too much anyway.
Casada com um homem narcisista do qual diz não ter energia para se divorciar, até porque em seu redor só vê mulheres na mesma situação, Jane deixa até de escrever no diário por não conseguir expressar o que sente, e a situação agudiza-se quando nasce o filho do casal, que tem de criar praticamente sozinha.
John said he had nothing to give me because he knew his life was harder than mine. I poured tears for a whole hour. He told me I was acting like a spoiled child, that the postpartum period was so much easier than his life, working at the bank instead of being an artist. (…) I wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hoping for a third option.
Não é, pois, de admirar a frustração que borbulha dentro de si e a consequente ira que tenta a todo o custo dominar…
It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.
…mas que acaba por libertar com um carregamento de tijolos da loja de bricolage, quando o marido sai repentinamente de casa, deixando para trás um rasto de mentiras.
On my side, the white concrete wall was marked by the red bricks. Each point of contact, a mark. Each mark, an artifact of a wife’s fury.
Pelo seu estilo confessional e pela opção de narrativa em forma de vinhetas, esta obra faz-me lembrar “Departamento de Especulações” de Jenny Offill, também ele um relato de um casamento em crise, embora em "Liars" a narradora seja uma mulher mais zangada que não se envergonha da sua raiva. Sarah Manguso diz que este livro é uma obra de ficção excluindo as partes que são verdade, evitando assim expor claramente a vida do seu filho e, em simultâneo, um possível processo judicial do seu ex-marido, tendo pela primeira vez na sua carreira procurado no Goodreads a reacção dos leitores, que interpreta como uma validação e uma amostra social assustadora.
A wife is an animal.
Quem é mais pernicioso? Aquele que mente aos outros ou a si mesmo?
I was proud of our family and of John’s career, so when he played video games all night, spent weekends painting, or stayed out body surfing in deep water while the child and I waited, shivering on the beach, I didn’t push back. I multitasked and made my own needs small as possible because, I thought, I was just more capable than he was. I assumed that made me valuable.
Em “Liars”, Sarah Manguso faz a autópsia de um casamento, primeiro conservado em formol devido aos seus esforços e à sua teimosia; depois, em evidente estado de putrefacção, o qual o seu marido acaba por enterrar, 14 anos depois, quando encontra uma substituta.
When I was young I’d sworn I’d never marry. I’d understood, back then, that commitment was a trap that closed off otherwise accessible exit routes. Then I had therapy for ten years and learned that commitment was a gift, the ability to give you heart to another.
Há casamentos que têm o seu período de lua-de-mel e que só passado algum tempo, com o cansaço das cedências e os desafios da rotina, é que começam a degradar-se, mas não é o caso de Jane que, desde o início, tem não um marido mas, antes, um emplastro.
By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of John’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed. John had gotten up and taken a shit.
Ao contrário do que se possa inferir, esta obra decorre no século XX e não 100 anos antes, mas é através da sua própria experiência que a protagonista começa a entender as mulheres que a precederam.
Tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrank away when my father tried to touch her: she was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of that rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid.
Depois de várias mudanças da costa leste para a costa oeste dos Estados Unidos devido aos inconstantes empregos do marido, Jane, professora de escrita e escritora, vê os seus dias a esgotarem-se em tarefas domésticas, a cuidar do gato e do filho, a tratar de toda a burocracia do casal, usando o pouco dinheiro que ganha para pagar a uma babysitter para poder continuar a escrever e a leccionar e, com a sua remuneração, poder continuar a alimentar o luxo de ter um trabalho criativo a tempo parcial.
I read a book by a woman who had never married or had children. I didn’t think I’d ever have become such a good writer – so, I said to myself, it was all right that the past two days of my life had been nothing but submission to my husband and child. I wouldn’t have amounted too much anyway.
Casada com um homem narcisista do qual diz não ter energia para se divorciar, até porque em seu redor só vê mulheres na mesma situação, Jane deixa até de escrever no diário por não conseguir expressar o que sente, e a situação agudiza-se quando nasce o filho do casal, que tem de criar praticamente sozinha.
John said he had nothing to give me because he knew his life was harder than mine. I poured tears for a whole hour. He told me I was acting like a spoiled child, that the postpartum period was so much easier than his life, working at the bank instead of being an artist. (…) I wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hoping for a third option.
Não é, pois, de admirar a frustração que borbulha dentro de si e a consequente ira que tenta a todo o custo dominar…
It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.
…mas que acaba por libertar com um carregamento de tijolos da loja de bricolage, quando o marido sai repentinamente de casa, deixando para trás um rasto de mentiras.
On my side, the white concrete wall was marked by the red bricks. Each point of contact, a mark. Each mark, an artifact of a wife’s fury.
Pelo seu estilo confessional e pela opção de narrativa em forma de vinhetas, esta obra faz-me lembrar “Departamento de Especulações” de Jenny Offill, também ele um relato de um casamento em crise, embora em "Liars" a narradora seja uma mulher mais zangada que não se envergonha da sua raiva. Sarah Manguso diz que este livro é uma obra de ficção excluindo as partes que são verdade, evitando assim expor claramente a vida do seu filho e, em simultâneo, um possível processo judicial do seu ex-marido, tendo pela primeira vez na sua carreira procurado no Goodreads a reacção dos leitores, que interpreta como uma validação e uma amostra social assustadora.
A wife is an animal.
August 25, 2024
2.5 rounded down
“I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage. It took effort. It felt so good to stop lying.”
Unpleasant and increasingly oppressive as the pages are turned, this novel (which reads more like a misery memoir) highlights the degree to which one woman sacrificially binds herself to cultural expectations and narratives—fairytales—about marriage. Jane, a writer, documents her fourteen-year relationship with would-be filmmaker/photographer/entrepreneur John, a narcissistic boor and loser. She willfully overlooks the multiple glaring warning signs—the selfishness and immaturity—that make him a far from suitable partner for anyone. The reader then gets a play-by-play of his ongoing insensitivity, irresponsibility, inattentiveness, laziness, carelessness, sense of entitlement, poor judgement, reactivity, enviousness, fragile ego, predilection for late nights (drinking, video games, flirting), sulkiness, arrogance, disdain, contempt, etc. etc. You name a negative, you’ve got it in John, the ultimate “piece of work.”
However (and importantly) instead of fleeing and self-correcting as a functional, basically reasonable, emotionally attuned individual would, Jane persists in her disastrous, toxic marriage. (Whether this is due to a history of mental health issues, some inner sense of being defective, is never totally clear.) She tallies up innumerable reasons for resentment and tells herself endless lies to justify her staying, displaying a degree of contempt for John that rivals his for her. She has a child with him. (Thank God she resists the impulse to have a second.) More than once she comments on how “lucky” she is. Yes, really. She is as much to blame for the mess she’s in as her nightmare of a husband.
People are not reasonable. I get that. I got that long before reading this. So what, exactly, is the point of this book? It appears to be autobiographical fiction. I guess the author was . . . hmm . . . “working it out.”
Manguso’s prose is generally strong. In terms of tone, there’s a lot of bitterness here, of course. There’s also sardonic humour. The language is not infrequently raw, coarse, and ugly.
Is this is a great, valuable, or illuminating novel? I don’t think so. Reading the first long section, “Liars,” is an experience akin to rubbernecking on a highway. As for the final “Afterward” section—in which the narrator grieves her lost time and comes to terms with the schmaltzy fantasy she bought into—although it’s twice as short as the first, it felt two times as long. At least the narrator does figure out why she married:
“Early on, maybe five years in, John had said, Are you only with me because I’m dark and handsome? and I’d said, I’ve left darker and handsomer, which had been true. But I saw now that it had also been a dodge. Even then, I’d known I was drawn mainly to his body.”
She also understands the reasons she remained. Among them:
“I’d simply told myself that I was wrong. That’s why I’d stayed. I was stubborn. I’d refused to admit I’d been wrong about him. [. . .] I thought a better man might leave me.”
All of it seems pretty obvious to me: talented women continue to throw away years of their lives for the sake of having a mate and fulfilling some weird fantasy about marriage. They do so by lying to themselves about themselves, about the man they’ve elected to be with, and about the mess they’ve got themselves into. However, contrary to the narrator’s insistence that women are coerced “by an entire civilization,” I believe they often do have agency; they simply refuse to exercise it and to take responsibility.
I know why I started this novel—I’d heard about Manguso and was interested in trying her work—but I’m not sure why I bothered to finish it. Maybe I wanted to know just what it would take for the main character to come to her senses. It’s a sad state of affairs that years of psychotherapy afforded her so little insight and so few tools for extricating herself from an awful mess.
“I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage. It took effort. It felt so good to stop lying.”
Unpleasant and increasingly oppressive as the pages are turned, this novel (which reads more like a misery memoir) highlights the degree to which one woman sacrificially binds herself to cultural expectations and narratives—fairytales—about marriage. Jane, a writer, documents her fourteen-year relationship with would-be filmmaker/photographer/entrepreneur John, a narcissistic boor and loser. She willfully overlooks the multiple glaring warning signs—the selfishness and immaturity—that make him a far from suitable partner for anyone. The reader then gets a play-by-play of his ongoing insensitivity, irresponsibility, inattentiveness, laziness, carelessness, sense of entitlement, poor judgement, reactivity, enviousness, fragile ego, predilection for late nights (drinking, video games, flirting), sulkiness, arrogance, disdain, contempt, etc. etc. You name a negative, you’ve got it in John, the ultimate “piece of work.”
However (and importantly) instead of fleeing and self-correcting as a functional, basically reasonable, emotionally attuned individual would, Jane persists in her disastrous, toxic marriage. (Whether this is due to a history of mental health issues, some inner sense of being defective, is never totally clear.) She tallies up innumerable reasons for resentment and tells herself endless lies to justify her staying, displaying a degree of contempt for John that rivals his for her. She has a child with him. (Thank God she resists the impulse to have a second.) More than once she comments on how “lucky” she is. Yes, really. She is as much to blame for the mess she’s in as her nightmare of a husband.
People are not reasonable. I get that. I got that long before reading this. So what, exactly, is the point of this book? It appears to be autobiographical fiction. I guess the author was . . . hmm . . . “working it out.”
Manguso’s prose is generally strong. In terms of tone, there’s a lot of bitterness here, of course. There’s also sardonic humour. The language is not infrequently raw, coarse, and ugly.
Is this is a great, valuable, or illuminating novel? I don’t think so. Reading the first long section, “Liars,” is an experience akin to rubbernecking on a highway. As for the final “Afterward” section—in which the narrator grieves her lost time and comes to terms with the schmaltzy fantasy she bought into—although it’s twice as short as the first, it felt two times as long. At least the narrator does figure out why she married:
“Early on, maybe five years in, John had said, Are you only with me because I’m dark and handsome? and I’d said, I’ve left darker and handsomer, which had been true. But I saw now that it had also been a dodge. Even then, I’d known I was drawn mainly to his body.”
She also understands the reasons she remained. Among them:
“I’d simply told myself that I was wrong. That’s why I’d stayed. I was stubborn. I’d refused to admit I’d been wrong about him. [. . .] I thought a better man might leave me.”
All of it seems pretty obvious to me: talented women continue to throw away years of their lives for the sake of having a mate and fulfilling some weird fantasy about marriage. They do so by lying to themselves about themselves, about the man they’ve elected to be with, and about the mess they’ve got themselves into. However, contrary to the narrator’s insistence that women are coerced “by an entire civilization,” I believe they often do have agency; they simply refuse to exercise it and to take responsibility.
I know why I started this novel—I’d heard about Manguso and was interested in trying her work—but I’m not sure why I bothered to finish it. Maybe I wanted to know just what it would take for the main character to come to her senses. It’s a sad state of affairs that years of psychotherapy afforded her so little insight and so few tools for extricating herself from an awful mess.
January 6, 2024
I wrote down the story again: I was proud of our family and of John’s career, so when he played video games all night, spent weekends painting, or stayed out bodysurfing in deep water while the child and I waited, shivering, on the beach, I didn’t push back. I multitasked and made my own needs as small as possible because, I thought, I was just more capable than he was. I assumed that made me valuable.
I took three shits before breakfast and two tranquilizers before the mediation session. John said that he wasn’t to blame for the divorce but that his hand had been forced. He described me as volatile and unsafe for the child to be around.
I wrote the word LIAR on a sticky note and stuck it onto the computer screen. It covered John’s face.
Liars is the story of a tumultuous relationship — from “first ferocious hunger” to the “strange dread at suddenly being divorced” fourteen years later — as related by a woman whose successful writing career seems unthinkable in the conditions under which she worked: with a flaky and jealous artist for a husband, a need to micromanage all the details of their household, and the (not entirely unwelcome) demands of motherhood, Jane is still able to release some well-regarded work; using various grants and fellowships to pay for part-time child care so she can continue to eke out work. The storyline is not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it does jump along in fragments; highlighting all the lowlights of this relationship and making it very clear to the reader that we are getting this story only from Jane’s POV — and while she makes the case that she married a liar, someone “bad at gaslighting”, Jane tells us a few times along the way that she’s a liar, too (it’s not incidental that the title is plural.) This reads a lot like a memoir — I suppose any novel about a novelist does — so I snooped around the internet to learn about author Sarah Manguso’s life, and the major strokes line up. Whether or not the fine details are a faithful account of Manguso’s own marriage, Liars positively has the ring of truth: I absolutely believed that Jane would enter this relationship, and that even if she was lying to herself along the way, that she made the choice to stay in this relationship and work on it — to the detriment of her professional life and mental health — and the truthiness here was like a punch to the gut; you know this is the kind of chosen misery some people live in and Manguso explores it beautifully. I haven’t read the author before, but I will definitely be looking into her backlist. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
John and his co-founder had landed an investment in their little film production company, and we would move to Los Angeles to staff it and build it in a cheap warehouse space. I feared that, after we moved west, John would divide his time between Cloudberry and his art, and I would be a lonely wife with no support system, maybe saddled with a baby, unable to write or teach — a real wife, the one thing I’d sworn to myself I’d never be.
Young and beautiful, bursting with creative energy, Jane thought she had found her soulmate in John: a visual/digital/filmmaking artist (he could do anything but write), dark and handsome with a cool, green gaze; the mental and physical attraction was immediate and intense. But while all Jane required in order to work was space, John soon got big entrepreneurial ideas that would see him wanting to move back and forth across the country several times, taking frequent business trips, and spending late nights out boozing and schmoozing when he was at home. All of the moving prevented Jane from getting on a tenured teaching track, and after their baby was born, Jane was mostly concerned that John’s job had health insurance and that their moves would land the family in good school districts for their son. Throughout their relationship, Jane did all of the housework, managed all of the bills — including John’s perpetual debt — took on the vast majority of child care, and spent long, lonely stretches of time waiting for a husband who was decreasingly interested in sex with her. This isn’t only the story of how challenging it is for a mother to be an artist (although it explores that, too), but the fact that John was jealous of Jane’s artistic success did contribute to their collapse; a singular tragedy, universally relatable .
Quotable bits:
• Elegies are the best love stories because they’re the whole story.
• A wedding vow is a mind game. You have to guess whether the person currently on his best behavior will someday value your physical, emotional, and financial health above the convenience of being able to just break the contract.
• My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.
• I had infinite patience with my one-year-old, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a two-year-old, and almost no patience with my husband, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a mother.
• On the one day John had to take the child to school, he forgot to pack a lunch. I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.
In my sleuthing, I found a couple of interesting interviews with Manguso online. On The Creative Independent website she says:
As a young person, I did not have any responsibilities beyond myself. I wasn’t part of a family. I wasn’t a mother. I didn’t even have a cat. It was very easy for me to identify with this kind of masculine ideal of the writer only ever writing. Then, of course, time passed and I made culturally inflected decisions that worked against myself as a writer. I married a man. I’ve since divorced that man. I had a child. I still have the child.
And in a conversation with fellow author/mother Kate Zambreno in The Paris Review, Manguso says:
After giving birth, if I wasn’t teaching or working on a contracted magazine piece, I worked on the infinite mountain of household tasks until I fell, already basically asleep, into bed. The sort of work necessary to make a book, the sort of work that looks like nothing, that doesn’t accumulate daily, that might require that you write two hundred pages only to throw them away…I was imprisoned in a system of capital within which that kind of work held no value, and, chillingly, it very quickly stopped holding value to me. The books I’ve written since my son was born have been written one pebble at a time, not at all like the books that I once wrote while suspended in a prolonged dream state. It’s worth adding that I was privileged as hell during this entire exercise, and it still, as you say, devastated me.
*Both articles are worth reading in their entirety; Manguso is thoughtful and fluent throughout.
Our relationship had been a fourteen-year conversation about the intersection of mental health and art, but really it was two arguments that never touched: John’s twin insistences that he was a great artist and that I was a deranged lunatic.
And back to the title: Despite the undeniably hard domestic conditions of Jane’s life, she does leave open the possibility that John’s not entirely wrong to call her “crazy” sometimes: there are frequent crying jags and screaming matches, (idle?) threats of self-harm, daily tranquillisers, and an obsessiveness to her cleaning and organising; along with his own failed artistic dreams, in the face of Jane’s successes, it must have been a hard relationship for John, too. Making the title of Liars plural seems an act of grace; an admission of shared responsibility, and the novel is stronger for it. I loved everything about this.
July 28, 2024
Liars is simply the story of the disintegration of a marriage.
So this book drove me a little crazy. At first it was because of the obvious - the husband is a Grade A waste of space. He is a typical gaslighter and does everything he can to trivialise his wife's achievements.
However my desire to throw the book through the window morphed somewhere around the halfway mark. Yes, the husband continues to be useless but the wife is such a martyr. She constantly moans about how little her husband does or how badly he does it then lists all the things she does. Then she tells us how her marriage is worth saving even though her husband is more hindrance than help.
Of course we know this is not an unusual story. It happens all the time- husband belittles wife; wife belittles husband; staying together because of a child. However it drove me slightly deranged because the woman kept on doing the same things over and over.
I would have edited this book down to half it's size. The whole last quarter of the book is just the wife moaning about things the husband was doing in his new relationship or things he'd done in theirs.
Far too much navel gazing and introspection for me. However if you like that sort of indepth analysis of a doomed marriage then this is the book for you.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the advance review copy.
So this book drove me a little crazy. At first it was because of the obvious - the husband is a Grade A waste of space. He is a typical gaslighter and does everything he can to trivialise his wife's achievements.
However my desire to throw the book through the window morphed somewhere around the halfway mark. Yes, the husband continues to be useless but the wife is such a martyr. She constantly moans about how little her husband does or how badly he does it then lists all the things she does. Then she tells us how her marriage is worth saving even though her husband is more hindrance than help.
Of course we know this is not an unusual story. It happens all the time- husband belittles wife; wife belittles husband; staying together because of a child. However it drove me slightly deranged because the woman kept on doing the same things over and over.
I would have edited this book down to half it's size. The whole last quarter of the book is just the wife moaning about things the husband was doing in his new relationship or things he'd done in theirs.
Far too much navel gazing and introspection for me. However if you like that sort of indepth analysis of a doomed marriage then this is the book for you.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the advance review copy.
August 17, 2024
This novel is filled with a woman’s (or ‘wife’s’) rage and I thought it was excellent! It’s intense and sad and yes, I can understand that some people will think the representation is too one-sided and/or exaggerated, but I think that’s exactly where the strength of this book lies. It reminded me of the last poems of Sylvia Plath wrote that were published in ‘Ariel.’ Very powerful and impressive.
Thank you Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Thank you Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
September 3, 2024
Nothing but misery and complaints.
There’s a quote from Claire Kilroy that calls the book “literary pointillism” which is a hilariously generous way of describing it. It’s like the protagonist kept a diary listing every bad thing that ever happened to her and every bitter thought she ever had. And nothing else! Designed to put you in a bad mood.
There’s a quote from Claire Kilroy that calls the book “literary pointillism” which is a hilariously generous way of describing it. It’s like the protagonist kept a diary listing every bad thing that ever happened to her and every bitter thought she ever had. And nothing else! Designed to put you in a bad mood.
August 1, 2024
I really liked the writing in this fragmentary novel. It is relentless in how fucked up everyday marriages can be. There is nothing extraordinary here and yet it is brutal. The husband here is a total jerk and the author does not let up on that. We can feel how trapped she is. It reads like a memoir. My biggest issue is this book is too long and bc not a lot happens, it could be shorter by 75 pages and been a really tight strong book, instead it get a little redundant in the end.
January 20, 2024
After turning the last page of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, my first thought was, “If this isn’t at least partially autobiographical, I’d be mightily surprised.”
There’s a raw intimacy, not unlike the feeling one gets from sitting across from a friend viscerally pouring out the heartache and angst of the aftermath of her marriage with an arrogant narcissistic bully. The feelings are so primal that it would be impossible to replicate in fiction. So I did something I don’t usually do: Google the author’s background. Indeed, many of the pieces do fit (although, of course, no reader can discern what’s true and what’s fiction).
The basics: Jane, a talented writer, meets John, who not only writes, but also draws and makes photographs and films. Despite some qualms about how the institution of marriage can destroy creative women, she goes ahead and marries him. But the dynamics of their marriage are revealed right in the beginning: “He said the only reason we weren’t engaged was that he couldn’t afford a ring. Then he arranged to get six new shirts made.”
John is all about John. He is self-immersed, never does his fair share, loves to exert his power, and makes Jane feel like she’s little more than an appendage to his needs and wants. Having a child together simply exacerbates his worst qualities. He begins to gaslight her.
The way readers will relate to Liars is a sort of Rorschach test about their own feelings about men and marriage. Sarah Manguso takes a risk – and it pays off – in writing this book in a sort of staccato style, the way you would narrate a sensitive story to an empathetic friend. It draws the reader in and immerses the reader in Jane’s life.
As someone who married later in life – and carefully chose a man who is both kind and supportive after going through my own share of Johns – I found myself often wanting to reach into the pages and ask, “What do you see in this guy? He’s Don’t you know you’re better than that?” I couldn’t help but think that Sarah Manguso was making an indisputable case, brick by brick, of the duplicity and worthlessness of John. The case was so airtight that I wished I had more insight into why Jane felt compelled to stay. (This question is answered, but not nearly enough for me.)
For those who enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment or Claire Kilroy’s Soldier, Sailor (and I did love both), I recommend Liars. At the end of the day, the Liars eluded to in the title are likely both John (who lies constantly to everyone) and Jane (who lies to herself). Thank you to Hogarth books for enabling me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.
There’s a raw intimacy, not unlike the feeling one gets from sitting across from a friend viscerally pouring out the heartache and angst of the aftermath of her marriage with an arrogant narcissistic bully. The feelings are so primal that it would be impossible to replicate in fiction. So I did something I don’t usually do: Google the author’s background. Indeed, many of the pieces do fit (although, of course, no reader can discern what’s true and what’s fiction).
The basics: Jane, a talented writer, meets John, who not only writes, but also draws and makes photographs and films. Despite some qualms about how the institution of marriage can destroy creative women, she goes ahead and marries him. But the dynamics of their marriage are revealed right in the beginning: “He said the only reason we weren’t engaged was that he couldn’t afford a ring. Then he arranged to get six new shirts made.”
John is all about John. He is self-immersed, never does his fair share, loves to exert his power, and makes Jane feel like she’s little more than an appendage to his needs and wants. Having a child together simply exacerbates his worst qualities. He begins to gaslight her.
The way readers will relate to Liars is a sort of Rorschach test about their own feelings about men and marriage. Sarah Manguso takes a risk – and it pays off – in writing this book in a sort of staccato style, the way you would narrate a sensitive story to an empathetic friend. It draws the reader in and immerses the reader in Jane’s life.
As someone who married later in life – and carefully chose a man who is both kind and supportive after going through my own share of Johns – I found myself often wanting to reach into the pages and ask, “What do you see in this guy? He’s Don’t you know you’re better than that?” I couldn’t help but think that Sarah Manguso was making an indisputable case, brick by brick, of the duplicity and worthlessness of John. The case was so airtight that I wished I had more insight into why Jane felt compelled to stay. (This question is answered, but not nearly enough for me.)
For those who enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment or Claire Kilroy’s Soldier, Sailor (and I did love both), I recommend Liars. At the end of the day, the Liars eluded to in the title are likely both John (who lies constantly to everyone) and Jane (who lies to herself). Thank you to Hogarth books for enabling me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.
July 23, 2024
The story centers around Jane—artist, wife, mother—who is growing slowly and ever more resentful of her distant, unhelpful, lazy partner; growing slowly more depressed; feeling more and more vexed with the minutiae of her every day life. Her husband, John, is prideful, insecure, a bully, and insists on cutting his wife down through his many manipulations.
“Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.”
This novel lacks any kind of typical structure or formatting, working in staccato sentences in an almost stream of conscious fashion. I expect that the reason behind Manguso writing this novel the way that she did is to really show—as another reviewer mentions—how Jane has fallen in to autopilot: moving through the motions of marriage and daily life while feeling completely and utterly dejected. I found the lack of thought given to the character names—John, Jane (which we hear only a time or two), and “the child” as he is often referred to—an intriguing and brilliant choice. Jane is so in her own head constantly and I loved it.
This all just felt too real and, in parts, achingly familiar. I needed to remind myself a few times that this book is being classified as fiction and not non-fiction because it read very like a memoir on nuclear family and divorce. I could understand and empathize with the narrator’s pain and frustration while also understanding her reasons for wanting to stay in a hopeless marriage. It was heartbreaking to witness. My e-book is heavily annotated with astute observations of a failing marriage and a woman filled with rage.
Thank you NetGalley for my digital copy. Pick yours up when it's out on 07/23/2024.
“Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.”
This novel lacks any kind of typical structure or formatting, working in staccato sentences in an almost stream of conscious fashion. I expect that the reason behind Manguso writing this novel the way that she did is to really show—as another reviewer mentions—how Jane has fallen in to autopilot: moving through the motions of marriage and daily life while feeling completely and utterly dejected. I found the lack of thought given to the character names—John, Jane (which we hear only a time or two), and “the child” as he is often referred to—an intriguing and brilliant choice. Jane is so in her own head constantly and I loved it.
This all just felt too real and, in parts, achingly familiar. I needed to remind myself a few times that this book is being classified as fiction and not non-fiction because it read very like a memoir on nuclear family and divorce. I could understand and empathize with the narrator’s pain and frustration while also understanding her reasons for wanting to stay in a hopeless marriage. It was heartbreaking to witness. My e-book is heavily annotated with astute observations of a failing marriage and a woman filled with rage.
Thank you NetGalley for my digital copy. Pick yours up when it's out on 07/23/2024.
July 25, 2024
Alberta representation in contemporary lit fic
July 26, 2024
The dissolution of a marriage that seemed doomed from the start. This rang too true not to have been experienced first hand. The author has a talent for writing about damaged family units, but this one contained too much sensory detail, and elimination of real data (e.g., names of the 3 family members were either eliminated or codified), to be fully fictionalized. The biggest liar here is the narrator, lying to herself even in this first person account. Claiming she envisioned a long marriage with this man, walking slowly and carefully together into old age. Despite remembering and recounting the numerous examples of his narcissistic self absorption and jealousy of her growing success as a writer. I was reminded more than once of Nora Ephron's Heartburn. Without the recipes.
July 30, 2024
Man that was really something. What that something was, I’m not quite sure yet but what I can say is that I have a feeling a significant amount (if not all) of women who have been in long term relationships or marriages will find lots in this to relate to. That’s not to say that everyone that can relate is in as awful a marriage as this, but I feel that certain themes are quite universal, themes like fulfillment (or the lack thereof) selflessness AND selfishness, discontentment, female roles & responsibilities, the complexities and contradictions of love, & the juxtaposition of finding fulfillment in motherhood, yet it not being enough etc.
To summarize, this was about a woman in a relationship with a man whom she loses respect for overtime and who is basically a manipulative, gaslighting asshole. The stream of consciousness narration style is not really a favorite of mine, but in this case, I thought it was fairly well done. There were parts that confused me tho, I could not always tell if our narrator was practicing true self deceit, avoidance, a fake it till you make it mentality or if she just had major fluctuations in sentiments towards her husband. Which that in itself is not unusual, as we all know that we all can be moody, it was more than just that the variations were of a more serious and intense nature. Like most of us do not hate our husbands, find him lacking in intelligence, feel completely taken advantage of and shattered, and then 5 mins later tell ourselves that we are so lucky to have such a loving & happy family.
Now that being said, I still very much enjoyed this. I heard comparisons being made to Elena Ferrante, and while I do understand the comparison thematically, stylistically I think they are worlds apart.
The writing itself didn’t seem to be the central focus, the sentences were terse, concise & compact which could have diminished the flow of the narrative, but somehow in this case it didn’t. I’m assuming that this was a deliberate choice intended to better convey her uneasy, frazzled state of mind. Liars’ strong suit is 100% it relatability, this was not a favorite but it was compulsively readable, and a solid four star reading experience.
To summarize, this was about a woman in a relationship with a man whom she loses respect for overtime and who is basically a manipulative, gaslighting asshole. The stream of consciousness narration style is not really a favorite of mine, but in this case, I thought it was fairly well done. There were parts that confused me tho, I could not always tell if our narrator was practicing true self deceit, avoidance, a fake it till you make it mentality or if she just had major fluctuations in sentiments towards her husband. Which that in itself is not unusual, as we all know that we all can be moody, it was more than just that the variations were of a more serious and intense nature. Like most of us do not hate our husbands, find him lacking in intelligence, feel completely taken advantage of and shattered, and then 5 mins later tell ourselves that we are so lucky to have such a loving & happy family.
Now that being said, I still very much enjoyed this. I heard comparisons being made to Elena Ferrante, and while I do understand the comparison thematically, stylistically I think they are worlds apart.
The writing itself didn’t seem to be the central focus, the sentences were terse, concise & compact which could have diminished the flow of the narrative, but somehow in this case it didn’t. I’m assuming that this was a deliberate choice intended to better convey her uneasy, frazzled state of mind. Liars’ strong suit is 100% it relatability, this was not a favorite but it was compulsively readable, and a solid four star reading experience.
August 22, 2024
5/5
Apie visas ir visom, kurios tvarkėsi, nes vyras sakė, kad kai jis sutvarko, taigi tau neįtinka. Kurios nurijo argumentą ar atsaką, po jo kritikos pliūpsnio. Kurių jie niekada neatsiprašydavo, o jei ir sugebėdavo, tai rasdavo milijoną pasiteisinimų, kodėl įskaudino. Kurios turėjo slėpti savo pasiekimus, juos numenkinti ar sumažinti, kad jis jaustųsi ne toks nevykėlis. Kurios klausėsi jo svaičiojimų apie milžiniškus planus, milžiniškus pinigus ir milžinišką sėkmę, kurie niekada neatėjo. Nes jis net indų nesugeba susiplaut po savęs, apie kokius pasaulį sudrebinančius verslus mes čia kalbam? Ir visoms, kurios tekėjo ar gimdė, nes manė, kad neturi kito pasirinkimo. Kurios viską matė ir suprato jau seniai, gal net iš pat pradžių, bet pačios neišlipo iš nuo tilto važiuojančio automobilio. Ir dar tam vairuojančiam diržą prisegė. Nes kartais meilė jam ir neapykanta sau eina koja kojon.
Manau, kad knyga viena tų, kurią geriausia skaityti vienu ypu, per vieną dieną, ant karštųjų, ant emocijos. Nes dozuojant ji tikriausiai prarastų savo užtaisą, tą intensyvumą, kurio yra pilna. Skaitymas nėra lengvas, nes vietomis atrodo, kad tai – tik savų ir svetimų nuodėmių rinkinys, bet nemanau, kad rasčiau moterį, kuri nieko nepajaustų. Kuri tiksliai nežinotų, kauluose nepajustų, kad ir pati su tuo taikstėsi, ir pati nutylėjo, ir pati ėjo paskui ir tvarkė, plovė indus ar keitė pampersus, nes jis gi nemoka, nes jam gi taip gerai nesigaus, nes jis gi kuria verslą, ar daro meną. Ar dulkina kitą.
Apie visas ir visom, kurios tvarkėsi, nes vyras sakė, kad kai jis sutvarko, taigi tau neįtinka. Kurios nurijo argumentą ar atsaką, po jo kritikos pliūpsnio. Kurių jie niekada neatsiprašydavo, o jei ir sugebėdavo, tai rasdavo milijoną pasiteisinimų, kodėl įskaudino. Kurios turėjo slėpti savo pasiekimus, juos numenkinti ar sumažinti, kad jis jaustųsi ne toks nevykėlis. Kurios klausėsi jo svaičiojimų apie milžiniškus planus, milžiniškus pinigus ir milžinišką sėkmę, kurie niekada neatėjo. Nes jis net indų nesugeba susiplaut po savęs, apie kokius pasaulį sudrebinančius verslus mes čia kalbam? Ir visoms, kurios tekėjo ar gimdė, nes manė, kad neturi kito pasirinkimo. Kurios viską matė ir suprato jau seniai, gal net iš pat pradžių, bet pačios neišlipo iš nuo tilto važiuojančio automobilio. Ir dar tam vairuojančiam diržą prisegė. Nes kartais meilė jam ir neapykanta sau eina koja kojon.
Manau, kad knyga viena tų, kurią geriausia skaityti vienu ypu, per vieną dieną, ant karštųjų, ant emocijos. Nes dozuojant ji tikriausiai prarastų savo užtaisą, tą intensyvumą, kurio yra pilna. Skaitymas nėra lengvas, nes vietomis atrodo, kad tai – tik savų ir svetimų nuodėmių rinkinys, bet nemanau, kad rasčiau moterį, kuri nieko nepajaustų. Kuri tiksliai nežinotų, kauluose nepajustų, kad ir pati su tuo taikstėsi, ir pati nutylėjo, ir pati ėjo paskui ir tvarkė, plovė indus ar keitė pampersus, nes jis gi nemoka, nes jam gi taip gerai nesigaus, nes jis gi kuria verslą, ar daro meną. Ar dulkina kitą.
August 7, 2024
I’m left wondering if I read the same Liars that everyone else who reviewed this book did. I had high hopes after seeing all the 5 star reviews.
I just don’t get the hype around this book. I can clearly see the gaslighting of the husband, but I felt like I didn’t connect with the storyline. It was hard to stay engaged.
I just don’t get the hype around this book. I can clearly see the gaslighting of the husband, but I felt like I didn’t connect with the storyline. It was hard to stay engaged.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 26, 2024
This was both nightmarish and realistic
September 2, 2024
First off, I highly highly recommend reading My Husband after reading this. They're two sides of the same coin and compliment each other beautifully.
I've never read anything so full of hard truths and hot (and accurate) takes. The power of this story is unlike anything else I've read. To be totally transparent, I'm not sure if it's just because I feel/have felt the same ways before - but MAN did this get hard to read at points. An extremely well done dissection of partnership and parenting and the invisible labor largely done by women/the primary caregiver in the home.
Before getting married I didn't know how much of a toll unpaid, invisible labor takes and how little weight the work carries in society's eyes. The stress and overwhelm that stem from simply keeping your spouse and child(ren) and home - and ideally your own mind and body - in one piece has never been put into words so accurately. I could go on and on, but Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care has done a great job of that for me. This is a modern depiction of that toll (yes, I'm reaching. the MC here was privileged for sure).
Married or not, I highly recommend reading this book. But especially if you aren't yet married and may want to be eventually - read this now! Revisiting it again after marriage and/or children will present you with a totally new book. My son being so young, I could still hear my pre-baby judgement of the MC's irritation in the back of my mind. In the short months I've been a mother though, I now understand and empathize with the anger. It's fleeting and so overpowered by the love you have for your family in the scheme of things... But in the moment? Man, that anger and feeling of hopelessness and loneliness is so, so heavy. Sarah has captured that crystal clearly.
(I feel like I have to add a note here saying that my husband doesn't suck, I'm happy in my marriage and love my family more than anything. This review isn't me saying I'm living this relationship. It's me being grateful for such blatant acknowledgement of how unbalanced the expectations, repayment and respect are for mothers/primary caretakers in the role they play vs the breadwinner, usually seen as the "foundation" of the home without which nothing could go on.)
I've never read anything so full of hard truths and hot (and accurate) takes. The power of this story is unlike anything else I've read. To be totally transparent, I'm not sure if it's just because I feel/have felt the same ways before - but MAN did this get hard to read at points. An extremely well done dissection of partnership and parenting and the invisible labor largely done by women/the primary caregiver in the home.
Before getting married I didn't know how much of a toll unpaid, invisible labor takes and how little weight the work carries in society's eyes. The stress and overwhelm that stem from simply keeping your spouse and child(ren) and home - and ideally your own mind and body - in one piece has never been put into words so accurately. I could go on and on, but Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care has done a great job of that for me. This is a modern depiction of that toll (yes, I'm reaching. the MC here was privileged for sure).
Married or not, I highly recommend reading this book. But especially if you aren't yet married and may want to be eventually - read this now! Revisiting it again after marriage and/or children will present you with a totally new book. My son being so young, I could still hear my pre-baby judgement of the MC's irritation in the back of my mind. In the short months I've been a mother though, I now understand and empathize with the anger. It's fleeting and so overpowered by the love you have for your family in the scheme of things... But in the moment? Man, that anger and feeling of hopelessness and loneliness is so, so heavy. Sarah has captured that crystal clearly.
(I feel like I have to add a note here saying that my husband doesn't suck, I'm happy in my marriage and love my family more than anything. This review isn't me saying I'm living this relationship. It's me being grateful for such blatant acknowledgement of how unbalanced the expectations, repayment and respect are for mothers/primary caretakers in the role they play vs the breadwinner, usually seen as the "foundation" of the home without which nothing could go on.)
June 17, 2024
Unfortunately, the subject matter of this book is not enjoyable in any way, shape or form. I forced myself to finish reading it.
August 14, 2024
This is a serious and well-reviewed work of literary fiction that reads like an amalgamation of every half-insane 3am postpartum Facebook mom-group post (or any other platform on which a woman attached to a baby can make an account that reaches other women in other locations who are also attached to a baby). It book made me laugh out loud, and it’s not funny.
The plot is propulsive, making it easy to read in a sitting or an otherwise similarly condensed amount of time. But, what the fuck?
Liars is aptly titled – it is not very truthful or generous, its narrator unreliable and dishonest even with herself. The real question, for me, is: Is this on purpose?
This is the great example of contemporary white female literary novel. An almost infantile rebellion against the disappointment of life. Marriage becomes a convenient direction to aim one’s fears of human aging and the despair of living. The spouse conveniently becomes the source, explanation, and stand-in for all that is bad (for Daddy, for Mommy, for career misgivings, for financial struggle, for inadequacy and all faults and fears of the self). There’s a lack of nuance to this story; without nuance, we can identify and express all the conflicting, complicated feelings life induces in us as, simply, Anger.
Anger, anger, anger! Feminism has revealed this anger to us; its source, its power, and explores its outlets. But modern feminism has led us into anger’s cage and locked us in from the inside.
Yes, we are angry. Okay, our anger is righteous. But this not new or unknown. When do we begin to ask what’s next? Is oblivious toxic femininity our best response to its inverse?
When do we accept that pain and unfairness is not an exception to the rule but simply a feature of human existence, and then explore how to Be within that system, in a way that does little or no harm?
By allowing ourselves to perceive our spouse as a representation of an entire system (of which they are, like you, only a solitary pawn) as opposed to a flawed individual, we doom our relationship automatically with almost no effort. It is no way to participate in marriage or to measure its level of success.
The work of genius or brilliance here, to me, would be if this book subverted the idea that most readers/reviewers seem to have taken from it – if this is not actually a story about heterosexual marriage and the inevitable pitfalls of the patriarchy and the revolting entitlement of the handsome white man and the extinguishing of a delicate feminine flame. If this is, instead, a story about our response to the modern world, to boredom and feelings of ineffectuality and irrelevance – our modern expression and examination of existentialism. Our response to a society designed to make life hard; particularly for women, particularly for women artists, particularly for women artists who are mothers and financially dependent.
Or if this was a story that was not trying to say something about the institution of marriage itself, but instead an on-the-nose horror story about a shitty guy doing the worst a man can do in a marriage (short of physical assault or familicide) and his shitty-in-a-different-way wife.
This is a story about two people who, as people often and will always do, got married without considering the implications of such an act and who had little real regard for one another on an individual level – classic mistake. This is a story about two people who did not enter their relationship, or proceed in it, in good faith and tried to skate on that thin ice armed only with blame, pretending to not know that blame sinks.
This woman is reactive, resentful, and lacks self-perception. She does not handle many things in this book appropriately. Now, was she wronged? Yes. Did her feelings have validity? Also, yes. But isn’t part of our job, as mothers, or parents in general, to teach our children that our feelings having grounding does not validate bad behavior? As for the husband and his ever-lengthening failures and transgressions...this guy is A Bad Man incarnate. You imagine him with the cleft chin of a Disney villain.
The heroine fantasizes about murdering him. She considers women who have committed infanticide and suicide and wonders, harmlessly, what the men did to them, first, to provoke such a response. She waxes poetically about the beautiful story of the famously wronged Aileen Wuornos, another strong woman lost to the patriarchy.
One wonders if a man could harmlessly wonder what a woman could have done to drive a man to kill her and her children, or himself in front of her, or to beat her, or to rape her, or to brutalize her in any number and variety of ways – and have that harmless thought published?
It’s not that murder isn’t a compulsion that is interesting or worthy of exploration – rather that it could be interesting, and fruitful, in the right hands. In this book…
Is this the best we can do? After a past spent as fuck-holes with no rights, respect, or, as Austen wrote, prospects, do we now in turn refuse to see men as our multidimensional human equals?
Yes, we are no longer victims! Instead, we (women) are the perfectly manifested response to a belligerently, consciously, evilly oppressive offense (men) that is yet, concurrently, inferior in all possible ways– namely in areas relating to empathy, intellect, intelligence, and capability.
I don’t know – a bad marriage is ripe soil for a novel, but this feels like a study of caricatures. One comes to the novel to explore consciousness and its hidden secrets. You can go to reality TV for convenient caricatures and a comfortable view of out-of-control behavior.
I think this book wants to be about marriage as an entity but is, instead, about specific people, people who play out their roles in this narrative like characters in a horror movie. Each sentence on each cleanly-spaced, ingestible (dare I say, photogenic?) page makes you want to stand up and yell “No! Stop!” Every page designed to bring you along on a journey of mounting, explosive anxiety.
This is a serious novel and yet it left me feeling the way I do after finishing an Emily Henry – all of this could have been solved with a little more communication.
The plot is propulsive, making it easy to read in a sitting or an otherwise similarly condensed amount of time. But, what the fuck?
Liars is aptly titled – it is not very truthful or generous, its narrator unreliable and dishonest even with herself. The real question, for me, is: Is this on purpose?
This is the great example of contemporary white female literary novel. An almost infantile rebellion against the disappointment of life. Marriage becomes a convenient direction to aim one’s fears of human aging and the despair of living. The spouse conveniently becomes the source, explanation, and stand-in for all that is bad (for Daddy, for Mommy, for career misgivings, for financial struggle, for inadequacy and all faults and fears of the self). There’s a lack of nuance to this story; without nuance, we can identify and express all the conflicting, complicated feelings life induces in us as, simply, Anger.
Anger, anger, anger! Feminism has revealed this anger to us; its source, its power, and explores its outlets. But modern feminism has led us into anger’s cage and locked us in from the inside.
Yes, we are angry. Okay, our anger is righteous. But this not new or unknown. When do we begin to ask what’s next? Is oblivious toxic femininity our best response to its inverse?
When do we accept that pain and unfairness is not an exception to the rule but simply a feature of human existence, and then explore how to Be within that system, in a way that does little or no harm?
By allowing ourselves to perceive our spouse as a representation of an entire system (of which they are, like you, only a solitary pawn) as opposed to a flawed individual, we doom our relationship automatically with almost no effort. It is no way to participate in marriage or to measure its level of success.
The work of genius or brilliance here, to me, would be if this book subverted the idea that most readers/reviewers seem to have taken from it – if this is not actually a story about heterosexual marriage and the inevitable pitfalls of the patriarchy and the revolting entitlement of the handsome white man and the extinguishing of a delicate feminine flame. If this is, instead, a story about our response to the modern world, to boredom and feelings of ineffectuality and irrelevance – our modern expression and examination of existentialism. Our response to a society designed to make life hard; particularly for women, particularly for women artists, particularly for women artists who are mothers and financially dependent.
Or if this was a story that was not trying to say something about the institution of marriage itself, but instead an on-the-nose horror story about a shitty guy doing the worst a man can do in a marriage (short of physical assault or familicide) and his shitty-in-a-different-way wife.
This is a story about two people who, as people often and will always do, got married without considering the implications of such an act and who had little real regard for one another on an individual level – classic mistake. This is a story about two people who did not enter their relationship, or proceed in it, in good faith and tried to skate on that thin ice armed only with blame, pretending to not know that blame sinks.
This woman is reactive, resentful, and lacks self-perception. She does not handle many things in this book appropriately. Now, was she wronged? Yes. Did her feelings have validity? Also, yes. But isn’t part of our job, as mothers, or parents in general, to teach our children that our feelings having grounding does not validate bad behavior? As for the husband and his ever-lengthening failures and transgressions...this guy is A Bad Man incarnate. You imagine him with the cleft chin of a Disney villain.
The heroine fantasizes about murdering him. She considers women who have committed infanticide and suicide and wonders, harmlessly, what the men did to them, first, to provoke such a response. She waxes poetically about the beautiful story of the famously wronged Aileen Wuornos, another strong woman lost to the patriarchy.
One wonders if a man could harmlessly wonder what a woman could have done to drive a man to kill her and her children, or himself in front of her, or to beat her, or to rape her, or to brutalize her in any number and variety of ways – and have that harmless thought published?
It’s not that murder isn’t a compulsion that is interesting or worthy of exploration – rather that it could be interesting, and fruitful, in the right hands. In this book…
Is this the best we can do? After a past spent as fuck-holes with no rights, respect, or, as Austen wrote, prospects, do we now in turn refuse to see men as our multidimensional human equals?
Yes, we are no longer victims! Instead, we (women) are the perfectly manifested response to a belligerently, consciously, evilly oppressive offense (men) that is yet, concurrently, inferior in all possible ways– namely in areas relating to empathy, intellect, intelligence, and capability.
I don’t know – a bad marriage is ripe soil for a novel, but this feels like a study of caricatures. One comes to the novel to explore consciousness and its hidden secrets. You can go to reality TV for convenient caricatures and a comfortable view of out-of-control behavior.
I think this book wants to be about marriage as an entity but is, instead, about specific people, people who play out their roles in this narrative like characters in a horror movie. Each sentence on each cleanly-spaced, ingestible (dare I say, photogenic?) page makes you want to stand up and yell “No! Stop!” Every page designed to bring you along on a journey of mounting, explosive anxiety.
This is a serious novel and yet it left me feeling the way I do after finishing an Emily Henry – all of this could have been solved with a little more communication.
April 30, 2024
Liars by Sarah Mangusao
Overall Grade: D+
Plot: C
Characters: B
Pacing: D
Setting: F
Writing: D
Best Aspect: The feelings of the main character.
Worst Aspect: The writing style was more like a personal journal than a novel. Lack of setting, chapters, dialogue. This just seemed uplike it could be called a novel.
Recommend: No.
Overall Grade: D+
Plot: C
Characters: B
Pacing: D
Setting: F
Writing: D
Best Aspect: The feelings of the main character.
Worst Aspect: The writing style was more like a personal journal than a novel. Lack of setting, chapters, dialogue. This just seemed uplike it could be called a novel.
Recommend: No.
May 31, 2024
Jane and John's marriage burns out. Issues include motherhood, being slightly more successful than her husband, and being dragged across the country multiple times because John sees himself much more successful than he was. Jane bends over backwards to support her husband but finds little support from him, combined with the ultimate betrayal.
Enjoy this book, I did. Should you buy it, yes.
Enjoy this book, I did. Should you buy it, yes.
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