Editorial Content for Liars

Warning: If you’re married, or planning to be, this book could make you feel very, very defensive. That doesn’t mean you’ll dislike it. So intimate a family portrait is seductive; it almost turns you into a voyeur, peeking inside one couple’s fraught, airless household. Divorce seems inevitable, yet there is suspense, too, because you don’t know exactly how and when the marriage will disintegrate. It’s a slow-motion train wreck.

LIARS belongs to an unconventional type of contemporary writing (think Rachel Cusk, Patricia Lockwood, Jenny Offill) that often sits on the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, attempting to capture the fragmentary, “everything everywhere all at once” nature of daily experience. Sarah Manguso’s previous books include poetry, the novel VERY COLD PEOPLE (2022), and nonfiction, notably ONGOINGNESS (2016), a consideration of the diary she’d kept for 25 years.

Structured chronologically, LIARS is a series of journal-like entries that juxtapose the philosophical/universal (“Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her”) with the unsparingly mundane (“The trouble with spending the day with a small child is that at the end of it you’re physically exhausted, mentally emptied, and you have nothing to show for it but a filthy house, filthy clothes, raw and peeling hands, and the inability to see beyond babyhood”). Judging from Manguso’s bio, the novel seems more than a little autobiographical. Her protagonists’ names, Jane and John, are intentionally generic, and their son is known only as “the child.” Could it be a form of revenge?

"Reading LIARS isn’t exactly comfortable. It vibrates with righteous anger and maternal love. You may find yourself arguing with it --- or tempted to throw it across the room. But if you’re up for a spiky, provocative take on marriage, give it a try."

If so, her ex-husband must be cringing. The depiction of John is devastating: attractive, immature, sulky, entitled, spendthrift, disorganized and unfaithful. Originally an artist, he reinvents himself as a tech entrepreneur and because of this they move six times in eight years, making it impossible for Jane, a writer, to get a decent teaching job, put down roots, or attain the “deep immersion” required for her own work (despite that, she manages to publish quite a few books, as has Manguso herself). “I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing,” she writes. While Jane cleans the house, John gets a massage. While she is in the ER with their child, he has gone to the movies and turned his phone off. After saying he can’t afford an engagement ring, he arranges to get six shirts custom-made. Worst of all, he lies. After he leaves, it becomes clear that his affair had begun long before their breakup.

But Jane is a liar, too. Her “denial phase” lasts 14 years, she admits, the span of her relationship with John. There are warning signs: “Without meaning to, I began to restrict the material in my diary.” Even before they are married, when she wins a fellowship John also applied for and did not get, she knew that “I’d have to conceal my pride.” It is only after he leaves that she can stop clinging “to the story of my happy marriage.” It is only in retrospect that she realizes how much she felt like a fake, as if being a wife were “a parlor game.” Jane is the real thing as a parent, though. Although she pulls no punches about its demands (“My personality and life had been swallowed by motherhood”), her tone turns tender when she describes an “animal intimacy” with her son. “Nothing, nothing in the world [is] like that.”

Manguso plays Jane’s flat, deadpan voice --- short paragraphs and terse, aphoristic sentences --- against the disturbing and painful content, to great effect: “By the time he left me, he hadn’t cleaned a bathroom in ten years.” “A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement.” “My marriage took on the color of sleet.” More like a report or an indictment than what we think of as a story, LIARS is a procession of highly quotable statements, anecdotes and summaries that add up to a damning case. Remember, though, that Manguso is also a poet, and at times --- describing the death of her cat (“My good, beautiful kitty, small warm weight on my lap on that last day”) or her love for the child (“My sweet, small bear of grief”) --- her writing is extraordinarily lyrical.

The result is powerful, if disturbing. There is material here that pretty much any woman I know would identify with: the unconscious lapses into self-censorship, for example, or the invisible, unpaid labor of child-rearing and cooking and cleaning and shopping (just this morning, I saw in the newspaper that according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023 American women did 50 percent more child care and about 30 percent more housework than men).

But does that imply an authentically happy marriage is by definition impossible? Jane seems to think so. “Not one of my married friends,” she writes, “had a spouse who wasn’t impossible most of the time.” Or again: “A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist.” And finally: “Maybe the trouble was simply that men hate women.” Although there are moments of romance and apparent contentment, Jane later dismisses what she called happiness as merely “the temporary cessation of pain.”

Reading LIARS isn’t exactly comfortable. It vibrates with righteous anger and maternal love. You may find yourself arguing with it --- or tempted to throw it across the room. But if you’re up for a spiky, provocative take on marriage, give it a try.