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:
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.

Did not complete. Do not recall request. Did not complete. Do not recall request. Did not complete. Do not recall request.

This is a searing expose of a marriage that’s falling apart. I would actually say all the warning signs were there long before vows were exchanged but my goodness does it keep getting worse. Our narrator is married to an unlikeable man child and I spent the book wanting bad things for him and the narrator to finally see her own self-worth. Eventually she comes to her senses but it takes a while - a while during which I was internally screaming.

Sarah Manguso - Liars

If you thought Rachel Cusk’s divorce book, Aftermath - which I admired in my review for its unflinching honesty: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/aftermath-on-marriage-and-separation-by-rachel-cusk-7554008.html - was brutal, then Liars will shock you. Sarah Manguso’s tenth book is an excoriating, thinly fictionalised account of her marriage. And it does not hold its punches.

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Written in her characteristic style of paragraphs without chapters, it is as compelling and addictive as reading the no-holds-barred diary of a relative. And yet, powerful as it is, it raises more questions than it answers.

The title alludes to the fictionalised version of Manguso’s husband, known here as John, but it also applies to her version of herself, Jane. John is a liar in the bad sense - he ends up betraying Jane before leaving her and their son. Jane, we are led to believe, is a liar because she repeatedly views her marriage through rose-tinted glasses, despite the devastating evidence to the contrary. So she is lying to herself; putting on a facade of being happily married, although almost every page lists John’s acts of selfishness, insensitivity, and uselessness as a husband and father.

It is obvious that Jane married a man-baby. John is a handsome but unsuccessful artist. During the course of their marriage, he embarks on a series of jobs as a joint founder of various companies, small roles in the film world, and then as an employee in other people’s firms. Reading between the lines, it seems that Jane marries him for his looks, his sense of humour, the fact that they have great sex together.

But none of these traits are enough to sustain a marriage, especially when a child is born. And in fact, the sex dwindles to the point where Jane humiliatingly has to demand it - and we all know that pressurising a partner with their obligations is not conducive to a happy sex or love life.

John is over-confident as well as under-qualified. He also doesn’t take failure well. When she meets him, John tells Jane he is applying for a writers’ residency in Greece and encourages Jane to apply too. Jane wins a coveted place, John doesn’t. Many of the winners turn up with a partner, but at the opening meeting, all the other partners sit in chairs next to the wall while the winners take seats at the table next to their individual piles of introductory material. But John insists on sitting with Jane at the table. Such objective evidence of John’s arrogance backs the veracity of Jane’s claims about his self-centred nature. There is no doubt that she has married an insensitive buffoon.

The stress on Jane of John’s inadequacy as a husband and father is exacerbated by his constant insistence that they have to move, for him to replace one well-paid job from which he has been sacked with another. How John manages to procure quite so many highly remunerated jobs when he seems to lack qualifications, attention to detail, or diligence remains a mystery - it may well be the known power of good looks and confidence and their ability to attract employers and funding - but Jane’s listing of John’s carelessness seem to be accurate given that he is sacked more than once.

The constant moves - they travel from Manhattan to Los Angeles, and then skip between LA and San Francisco a few times - mean it is difficult for writer Jane to maintain any permanent teaching job or good childcare in order to have time to write. It also isolates her, although thankfully she does have good friends she stays in touch with.

So it seems John is a man-baby - a guy whose looks and charm have always lubricated his passage through life without the need for talent, ideas, or endeavour.

But the reader starts to have doubts about Jane’s version of events - and there is no intention here to paint her as an unreliable narrator. Manguso presents her alter-ego as the stalwart who does all the housework and childcare and who has to deal with a selfish and lazy slacker of a husband who ends up betraying her. But then we look at Jane’s representation of other people, and she doesn’t come across as the depicted caring and lovely person driven to impotent rage. For example, she is horribly judgemental of John’s dying mother:

‘For Christmas we gave her herbal tea, almonds, and artisanal cooking salt.

She left the gifts on the kitchen counter and ate blocks of grocery-store cheese, cookies, cake, and cinnamon rolls spread with half an inch of butter…

Christmas dinner was at a restaurant draped in polyester napkins, all the food sprinkled with powdered cheese, chocolate syrup drizzled on the dessert plates.’

Jane is similarly sneery about her own parents. They visit after the birth of Jane and John’s baby:

‘My parents came to meet the baby. My mother was holding an obviously secondhand oversized teddy bear with a rumpled $50 price tag on it. My father hugged me. My mother didn't seem to know how to hold the infant and didn't think to wash her hands until I told her to. She said that a stranger had stayed in my parents' house until I was four weeks old, taking care of me day and night. I hadn't known that.’

And:

‘My parents sat in the apartment watching me change diapers and feed and soothe the baby. When I suggested they could run to the laundromat, my mother said, We can drop off the stuff and you can pick it up later. I said, That isn't actually helpful.’

Jane is similarly uncharitable about others. When a stranger she meets at a party responds to Jane by showing sympathy, it is not interpreted as the empathy it is:

‘At a party, while answering my question about her own marital troubles, a woman cut herself off by saying But you've been through so much. Suddenly she needed me to have suffered more.’

Really? This has happened to me - not in terms of sympathy for my marriage, because I have a very happy one - which I know is largely down to good luck. But it frequently occurs when discussing health, when friends or strangers demur that I have had a tougher time than them. I take it as the kindness it is.

At other times, Jane erupts at relatively minor incidents - when John decides to go out when they had previously agreed to do yoga together. And Jane sometimes expects a lot of him - when she is worried about her narrow stools and sees a gastroenterologist, she doesn’t ask him to do a rectal examination - she waits until she is home, then later asks John to do so - which he does, and even with good humour.

But John’s laziness in domestic matters seems evident and it seems that Jane’s suffering leads to a rage not only against John - which is well documented here - but against the world. That this is Manguso’s character rather than an idiosyncrasy of the fictional Jane is suggested by the fact that in her memoir about her auto immune disease, The Two Kinds of Decay, which I reviewed here: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-two-kinds-of-decay-by-sarah-manguso-2198239.html , Manguso’s suicidal ideation presented as an urge to drive the wrong way down a busy road. This caused me significant disquiet. As a fellow sufferer of auto immune disease (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, scleroderma, anti-phospholipid syndrome), I’ve had some bad times, and a long time ago, after breaking up with my first long-term boyfriend, I felt suicidal, but my own fleeting plan for suicide was to bring home a syringe pump and put myself into a forever sleep with an anaesthetic. I lived alone at the time. The act would have minimal impact on others.

I never seriously planned it, it was a thought that crept stealthily into my mind and was banished almost immediately. But I can’t get my head around those who would willingly kill others in their own suicide.

But this is not intended to be a character assassination. Manguso is a talented writer and this is raw, painful stuff. And she is not alone in falling for the wrong person - most of us have at some stage - her misfortune is marrying them. And many of us lash out when we are miserable; albeit in smaller ways. But Jane seems blind to the fact that she, too, has flaws. And she is not presented as a character impervious to her faults. As far as Manguso and Jane are concerned, Jane was naive to marry John; she was a fool to put up with him so long; she tried to convince herself that their marriage was fine; she responds with rage to John’s lax attitudes and profligacy. She is put upon, she is a martyr. She speaks out for generations of women who have been expected to deal thanklessly with dull household chores, repeated daily, and with the vicissitudes of bringing up small children. She feels guilty for having previously overlooked their plight.

Interestingly, other heroines in the book are not named. ‘Third babysitter’, who is kind, good with the child, and goes over and beyond in her helpfulness and sweetness, doesn’t deserve a name. Yes, it would be a fictional name, but it would still confer some kudos, some brief acknowledgement. Perhaps it would give her permanence; an identity, and detract from Jane being the hard working, child-nurturing star at the heart of the book.

John is described in the book as a perpetrator of domestic abuse, even though the only time he slaps Jane is after she slaps him first. Yes, abuse can be emotional too, but there is a danger of belittling domestic abuse by labelling all hopeless, insensitive, unfaithful husbands as domestic abusers. In the acknowledgements, Manguso name-checks a domestic abuse group with whom she has been very involved since her divorce. There is no doubt that ‘Jane’ had a terrible time in her marriage to this entitled lunk. But you give something the worst label possible, it doesn’t leave you anywhere to go if you ever experience worse. Which I very much hope she doesn’t.

loveee a litfic about motherhood/wifehood/womanhood in general, so I knew this was going to be a win for me. this reminded me of My Husband, but looking at it from another side of the coin.

overall this was addictive, devastating, and all too familiar.

3.5 stars

Liars is Sarah Manguso's ninth novel but it's the first of hers that I've read. It's written with an urgency, almost in the style of short diary entries, and it's a retrospective on a marriage and its disintegration.

Writer and critic Jane meets John, falls in love, and believes that she has found everything she has ever wanted: a handsome man, a fellow artist and a thrilling and dynamic attraction that she hopes will stand the test of time. They go on to have a child and as time moves on, the realisation dawns on Jane that she has sacrificed everything to become a wife - her career, her self-esteem, her independence and ultimately, her pride.

Gripping and brimming with vitriol and rage, Liars feels semi-autobiographical, such is the specificity and clarity of thought throughout. Some of the insights into the marriage and how the separation transpires are so shocking and yet so typical too - during the moment of their separation when Jane is struggling to process the split, John offers to call an ambulance for her, implying that she is mentally unstable. I know someone who went through this exact experience. John's gaslighting and narcissism will be relatable to many I fear.

A very good read. It's not a favourite, but the intensity of the story and the quality of the writing meant I looked forward to picking it up at every opportunity.

Many thanks to the publisher Picador for the arc via @netgalley. Liars was published in August 2024. As always, this is an honest review. 3.5/5 stars

This compelling novel delves into the intricate roles of being a wife, mother, and artist, showing how marriage can sometimes shatter dreams.

Jane, an aspiring writer, marries filmmaker John Bridges. At first, their marriage is a harmonious blend of creativity and happiness, but Jane soon finds herself eclipsed by John’s ambitions. As her career takes off, their marriage begins to deteriorate, ultimately leading to John’s departure.

This book offers a profound exploration of the sacrifices and challenges faced by women artists within a traditional family structure. It’s a must-read for anyone who enjoys an emotionally charged story about love, ambition, and the stark realities of marriage.

Really enjoyed this book. Excited to see what comes next from the author.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read it!

Liars started out as a three-star read for me untill about halfway in. From there it slowly progressed to a four-star read, untill at ninety percent it, surprisingly, turned into a five-star read all the way to the end.

There are mainly two reasons why Liars was a slow start for me. There are no chapters. The entire book is one long chapter. At least it's a short read, so eventually it no longer mattered to me that there weren't any chapters to give me a stop or start point, especially once I got pulled deeper into Jane's life and got wholly engrossed in her innermost thoughts and feelings.

The second thing was that Jane's point of view jumped around a lot and it disoriented me as I struggled to get a grip on where in the timeline of her marriage or life we are. Eventually it started making sense and became easier to follow, but for the first half of the book I felt rather lost.

That aside, there are a ton of things I liked about this novel, though I won't be discussing all of it. My interest started peaking in the second half of Liars once I found my footing. First of all I liked that these aren't clear-cut characters. Their imperfections and flaws make them completely lifelike and relatable.

Secondly, I liked the MC's brutal, raw honesty about marriage and relationships. She holds nothing back, doesn't sugarcoat anything, and calls a spade a spade. Having been married twice in my life, one terrible marriage and one really great one, I could relate on so many levels with Jane about the beauty and the ugliness of such a union. Being a parent myself, I felt she absolutely nailed it with her views on the good and bad of being a mother.

Lastly, it was hard to ignore her perspective on how relationships make liars of us all in countless ways; to each other and ourselves. Her view on this is spot on. I loved that this got me thinking and questioning some things about my past relationships. Are we really in happy relationships, or are we deceiving ourselves, following the narrative set by our spouse, the expectations of family, and society in general?

I recently finished Weike Wang's Rental House which also offers an eye-opening perspective on marriage and several other important topics. That was a four-star read for me and another interesting book I enjoyed. However, Liars offers an even more in-depth and hard-hitting insight into marriage, being a mother and wife, and how we are slowly but steadily conditioned to only see what your life partner and society as a whole wants you to see about the wife's role in a marriage and as a mother. Of course, this doesn’t apply to every single marriage or mother or career woman out there, but is rather a viewpoint shared in the broader sense.

This might seem like a cynical outlook on marriage in general, and might even sound like a boring read. I assure you though, it's neither, and book clubs and discussion groups will have a field day with this multi-faceted novel. There were so many times I re-read sentences and entire paragraphs because the truths of what Jane was pointing out was so powerful, it struck a chord with me. I wanted to commit it all to memory.

Admittedly, there were also several instances where I had to stop reading and ask myself if Jane is even a reliable narrator. That, for me, was one of the most intriguing parts of the book: is what she says true, or is the reader slowly being manipulated to see things her way?

The author skilfully explores Jane and John's marriage from every single angle, which by the end culminates into a really clever and thought-provoking read. It won't appeal to everyone, but I do recommend giving it a chance as Liars exposes every nuance of how many couples allow themselves to live a lie.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this advanced reader's copy and the opportunity to read this early. Review has been posted on Waterstones and Amazon.

Fun and gripping reac

Liars by Sarah Manguso is the story of Jane, a creative, a wife, a mother. A woman whose career began to soar while her husbands resentment grew with it, culminating in his leaving her and the devastating effect and her powerful regeneration into her true self

A sad reflection of the reality of toxic masculinity, but a stunning account of determination and fortitude in the face of adversity.

Thank you to NetGalley, Pan Macmillan | Picador and the incredible Sarah Manguso for this outstanding ARC

I have been on an absolute tear through divorce memoirs in 2024, and though fictional, Liars fit the vibe perfectly. The whole book shimmers with anger and offers plenty of interesting material to chew on in a book club discussion. At times I sympathised deeply with the narrator, sharing her fury at what a let down her husband was - at other times I was ready to throw the book at the wall, so frustrated was I that the protagonist wouldn't take more responsibility for her situation and just leave. Kept me ruminating until the final page

I thought this was a really interesting and accomplished novel about desire and marriage told over a number of years, I think it skewers the fantasy of the creative life but also shows how easily one can let go of being in control of one’s own life. I can tell that it will be a book that a lot of people will see themselves in and while it dipped slightly towards the middle there was a recklessness about it that overall made it a compelling read.

I remember someone (an agent possibly?) telling me that no one is interested in reading about someone’s marital breakdown and divorce, but with the increasing appetite for relatibility among readers, maybe that’s not quite true. Although at times I felt like shaking the narrator for being so blind and misguided as to not spot the red flags – but, hand on heart, have we always been wise in our own relationships? This sounded very true indeed to me and was also quite painful to read.

It has been a long time since I read a book with a male character who was so utterly and completely infuriating. The book was quick to read but it was a story that was really rich in character and gave a full insight into the slow and painful breakdown of the marriage.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

This book gripped me from the first page- the bitter and fractured relationship between the two main characters in a horrible union that they both want to escape was very well done- full of nuance and tension, as well as some wit.

I thought that the narrative tone was perfectly realised- a bitter and sardonic tone of a woman who has reached every limit but is unsure how to continue, whilst also remembering the good times.

Great fun, and very sharply observed.

Disturbingly readable, you’re never quite sure where you are and who to believe in this novel, which I’m sure is the point. Left a nasty taste but in a good way. I couldn’t not finish it.

I really enjoyed this novel - more of a novella in length but very rich and complex in material, incredibly absorbing and very much evokes the emotions of a disintegrating marriage and divorce. Highly recommended and thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

OMG I hate books about men who blame the women in their life for their problems. Not a fan of this story. If someone whose had a marriage they didn't want to stay in this could be really triggering.
I wasn't a fan. I skimmed the last portion of it.

This read almost dystopian in that it showcases a story of an abusive and manipulative marriage, and your're let into the deepest and darkest thoughts of a wife and mother as she suffers from her marriage with a literal man child. While frustrating to read, I couldn't put this book down and I feel that's a testament to how well this book was written. The reality of misogyny in out modern world was intricately captured and all the frustration built up to a relieving "happy" ending when our main character finally found clarity. I really enjoyed this one and am excited to read more of Sarah Manguso's work