I'm Billy No Mates here. Really didn't connect with the book at all. Unlikeable characters and I found myself questioning why anyone would continue with the marriage.
Lots seem to have loved it so, we are all different but not for me

Thank you to Hogarth and NetGalley for a ebook copy of this novel.

Wow this is a whirlwind of emotions in a such a small novel. Liars is a in-depth analysis of the nuclear family, gender roles, femininity and sexuality. John and Jane are the outline to many relationships and how they begin, as well as how they end. I found myself clenching my jaw in frustration to the behaviour of John and how he managed to get away with it for as long as he did.

But this is also a story about reclaiming one’s self after such a traumatic and emotionally stunting relationship. To reclaim one’s sexuality and spirituality after a divorce is something I only know on a baseline level, but this made me feel as though I was a part of the journey of self discovery.

Overall, I really liked this, and look forward to other books by the author in the future.

Oh lord. So good. Unbearable, and yet unputdownable. Mortifying, blood curdling. Any underlying rage I've been letting simmer or trying to suppress, pushed its way easily to the surface reading this. The adrenaline of it kept me going. Completely devastating, and the most powerful, searing and utterly persuasive argument against marriage, and in effect, men.

I'm so so grateful to have received an ARC of this - tore through half of it in an amazed and horrified daze before it ran out, then rushed to buy a physical copy. It's a lot to stomach, but absolutely an essential read that pulls you along. Have never read an account quite like it, with such visceral and intricate detail of all the unpaid, unappreciated, emotional and physical labour women take on, the reverberating toll of mens weaponised incompetence, and the sickening amount of unseen abuse that is suffered. Sarah is just ingenious and full of unbelievable talent.

4.5.

This is a beautiful book.

The writing is so emotive and such a different voice. It's a funny, sad, deep journey of marriage and motherhood and divorce, the dynamics of relationships, mental health. I found it so incredibly relatable at so many points and was completely riding the waves of Manguso's words.

Sarah Manguso crafts a poignant exploration of truth and deception, weaving her personal experiences with broader themes of memory and identity. I found her prose to be both lyrical and incisive, drawing me into her reflections on the nature of honesty and the lies we tell ourselves and others. The way she navigates complex emotions is a definite highlight, making her insights feel deeply relatable.
However, I did feel that at times the narrative could be a bit meandering, which occasionally detracted from the overall impact of her arguments. While some sections left me wanting more depth, the book ultimately offers a thought-provoking perspective on the human condition. Manguso's ability to blend personal narrative with philosophical musings is commendable, making it a worthwhile read, even if it doesn't fully hit the mark in every chapter.

Liars is one angry book! It tells the story of a disintegrating marriage where both the husband lies to the wife (about his affair) and she in turn lies to herself (that everything was ok when of course it wasn't). Told from the point of view of Jane, the wife in question, her life is traced back to when she first met John, a handsome artist. The staccato paragraphs read rather like a diary without the relevant dates, which adds to the sense of dread and destructiveness in their ongoing 15 year relationship. Jane constantly questions herself as to how she ended up trapped into becoming a traditional wife, moving home constantly to keep up with John's never ending changes of job. In the meantime her own career suffers as a direct result of his lack of success. It's a gripping, if depressing scenario. Many thanks to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the opportunity to read and review this book.

"Elegies are the best love stories because they're the whole story."

Oof, this book! Reading Liars did my blood pressure absolutely no favours. I swear I could feel it rising the angrier the novel made me, and the whole thing is rage-inducing. If you are looking for a compelling story, Sarah Manguso's exploration of the disintegration and dissolution of a marriage fits the bill.

When Jane and John meet they are both artists. Jane, a writer and John, a filmmaker. When John's career pivots into entrepreneurship – to varying degrees of success – Jane's takes a backseat. When they marry and become parents, Jane's life shrinks more as she is consumed by the roles of wife and mother.

Told entirely from Jane's point of view, in stream of consciousness style vignettes, Liars charts their fifteen year relationship and its ultimate downfall. It's incisive. There is a creeping sense of dread throughout, even though we know about the divorce from the get-go. It's rage-inducing. I loved it!

I think naming her characters Jane and John was a genius move because it made me think of Jane Doe and John Doe, which added to the everyman quality of both characters. As if Manguso is saying to the reader, this could be you or someone you know. This is, in many ways, a very ordinary marriage. Yet, it is also utterly destructive.

I was first introduced to Manguso's work during a writing class I took in the early years of the pandemic, and I devoured and adored her non-ficton books shortly afterwards, especially 300 Arguments and The Two Kinds of Decay. Liars is my first time reading Manguso's fiction, and I am so glad I picked it up. I'm off to read her debut novel, Very Cold People.

The pared back, almost removed style of writing in this book really works. It screams of the abject acceptance of a life that wasn't wanted that Jane feels...how did this happen to her? How did she fall into traditional wifedom? Is she unreasonable?
The second-guessing and attempts to convince herself that she is happy in her marriage are heart-breaking to read, the emotion jumps off the pages and lodges in your gut. Jane continually trying to write the story of her marriage in a few sentences shows the things she glosses over or maybe is committing to paper to try and make them really how she sees her life. She feels so utterly trapped and her husband, a gaslight extraordinaire, does nothing to make the reader think any differently. he lives in a parallel reality, where he is the martyr and star, it's all so terribly familiar and depressing...not that the book is depressing, it actually didn't leave me feeling flat. I felt resolute, I wanted to make sure I never allowed this to happen to me and that I would be there if I saw it in my friend's relationships. It felt like a cathartic thing for Sarah Manguso to have written, full of muted rage.

In clipped and matter of fact sentences, Manguso's narrator unflinchingly documents the psychological and emotional fallout of a marriage that is slowly disintegrating. Liars is a very introspective read and it’s too heavy to be read in one sitting.

Sometimes a book just isn’t for you. Wrong time, wrong place.
“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”

This one short paragraph sums up this illuminating insight into a totally fractured relationship and marriage. The husband beyond unlikeable, but I also began to run out of sympathy for the wife for not leaving!!

Thank you to the publishers Picador (Pan Macmillan), NetGalley, and the author for providing me with an ARC of Liars.

I'd never read any Sarah Manguso previously, but have heard great things about her writing, and so was really looking forward to delving into this. And it didn't disappoint!

Though there's no denying that this was at times a very difficult read, that doesn't take away from its greatness. Liars is told from the perspective of Jane, who details her 14 year long marriage with John, which at times seems loveless and a marriage of tribulation. We witness the downfall of the marriage. Liars details the realities of motherhood, and more generally, what it means to be a woman.

My blood was BOILINGGGG when reading about John's AUDACITY. I read this in just over a day and I hope that that is testament enough to how great Manguso's writing is and how well she captured womanhood and abusive relationships.

This sounded like one I’d enjoy and it absolutely did not disappoint, I devoured it in 24 hours!!

This book is incredibly powerful and stirred a lot of emotions in me, particularly anger towards John. His behavior and lack of action make him a truly despicable character. The story tackles the tough question of “why didn’t she just leave him?” in a compelling way.

The informal structure of the writing suits the narrative perfectly, helping to convey the intense emotions Jane experiences during the fallout of her marriage. It gave such claustrophobic vibes, sheer frustration and despair for her. So much so, it dragged you in and fully immersed you within the story.

This novel is brutally realistic and absolutely gripping. While I can't say I enjoyed it, I was completely engrossed and was fully obsessed with what I was reading. I'm eager to explore more of this author's work and plan to dive into her earlier books.

Massively recommend for anyone who loves a strongly immersive read that makes you feel everything!

A sharp and unflinching story of motherhood whilst in a toxic marriage. ‘enjoyed’ is probably not the right word but I couldn’t put it down, and the relief I felt when she was finally free of awful useless John!!

A forthright straight-talking and condemnatory tale of motherhood and marriage and the impact that has on a woman's creativity. Searing and heartbreaking, the simple and direct style tells the truth, even when it really hurts. Enough to put anyone off, if it's not too late!

The third novel from this Los Angeles resident whose published work has also included non-fiction and poetry. This is the story of an unhappy marriage, an unflinching one-sided first-person narrative which records the manipulations, gaslighting, aggressions and continual scoring of points. I wouldn’t suggest buying this book for anyone as a wedding present!
It's written in short passages without chapters and there’s a definite poetic feel to the writing but it is a poetry rooted in soul-bearing with a willingness to air everything. These passages often explode with a rush of indignation, anger, confusion or humiliation and are related without much development. This has the effect of making it quite a quick read, although you will be stopped in your tracks by what it written and how it is conveyed. It does also create a distance, it does not flow as we would expect a traditional narrative to, which hammers home you are reading only what the narrator, the wife, wishes to convey. The husband is fairly odious from the get-go and I certainly would question what she saw in him and why she stayed with him, when she recognises his behaviour as so coercive, but given the clever use of the plural in the title I found myself guiltily questioning how reliable a narrator she is.
This is an intense read, it’s helped along by bitter humour and especially the narrator’s desire for love. Pretty ambivalent about the idea of becoming a mother her account of learning this on the hoof, a learning not shared by her partner feels convincing and is powerfully done.
This is strong stuff but the style did make me feel as an onlooker onto this marriage that I was continually being bashed about the head by the recording of their everyday life. It’s both very personal, in what is being shared, and impersonal (their offspring referred to throughout as “the child”). I admired the quality of writing but I couldn’t help the discomfort I felt in such close analysis of this relationship nor my irritation at these characters and the repetition of bad behaviour over the years. Nobody seems to learn anything, but I guess that is the point.
For me the toxicity was a little overpowering and felt a little one-note as the novel progressed and the relentless introspection was a little too intense for me to want to give it my five star rating but it’s a powerful read, which some will find triggering but some will hopefully learn something that the characters seem to be missing out on.
“Liars” is published in the UK by Picador on 22nd August 2024. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Happy Publication Day to this enraging, frustrating, brutal and eye opening novel.
Liars is a story about a marriage, its beginning, its creeping rot and its annihilation. Jane meets John in her 30s, they are both artists, she a writer who has already achieved success , he a dreamer , a hopeful film maker , always striving to find success in the next thing. The novel traces their relationship from its beginning to its ending as Jane’s life becomes shrunken and overshadowed by that of her husband.

This is brilliantly written and evoked so many emotions in me when written, mostly rage towards John, his actions and inactions, he’s a truly awful character and this book goes some way in answering the age old question of “but why didn’t she just leave him?”

The lack of formal structure works well, I enjoyed the writing style, it assisting in capturing so much of the emotion in this book , the claustrophobia, frustration and ultimately devastation that Jane feels as her marriage struggles on.

Brutally realistic, this was an excellent read , I can’t say I enjoyed it but I couldn’t put it down. I need to read more from this author, looking forward to reading some of her previous books now.

This would be an official excellent choice for a book club, there is much to digest and discuss.

Recommend.

A portrait of a marriage from challenging beginnings to bitterest of ends. Sarah Manguso’s compulsively readable novel was written in a fury after 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 promising career, as he ruthlessly moves them from city to city, rented home to rented home. John has no qualms about reading, then rubbishing, Jane’s work in progress, or 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 purely an American problem. 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.

A writer slowly sees her life narrowed down to the role of wife and mother. An insecure and bullying husband and a baby bring on reflections on what she could have been. Sad and enraging, and very real.

Liars
By Sarah Manguso

Jane, a writer grew up fully convinced that she would never marry and had no interest in having children, that is, until she meets John, an artist and filmmaker, who wants all the things she does, a future filled with the pursuit of artistic freedom. What could possibly go wrong?

15 years later Jane's creative hopes and aspirations lie in tatters, her marriage and motherhood having ensnared her in a trap of her own making, while John has no misgivings over exercising his gender advantage at her expense.

" The purpose of marriage was to get stuck, I thought, so that one was forced to fix the marriage in lieu of leaving"

"Even a decent marriage drains the life out of a woman... it really is absolute shit, being a man's wife. I swear up and down that if I outlive this marriage, I will never be with a man again. "

Written in a style similar to journal entries, the story of this failed union is told in first person by Jane, as she vacillates between listing all the ways she feels abused by John, and all the ways she allows him to subsume her. They lie to each other, they lie to other people and they lie to themselves.

This is angry literature, volatile, visceral, the type of outpouring of hurt and recrimination is featuring a lot recently. I am reminded of "Soldier, Sailor" by Claire Kilroy, "Love Novel" by Ivana Sajko and "The Divorce" by Moa Herngren. This might not be totally relatable to every reader, but is smacks of authenticity, with many profound insights into gender inequality and male entitlement.

A quick read that is bound to raise your hackles.

Publication date: 22nd August 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #panmacmillan for a review copy in exchange for my honest opinion

This is very different to other books I have read as you really get into the narrators mind. The book is told from wife and mother Janes narrative. The prose is short, sharp and to the point and flowed really well. She feels her husband doesn't value her and marriage is nothing like how she imagined. They move for her husbands job often and she is the one left to look after the house, child and cat and often feels ignored and taken advantage of. Her and her child are often sick and there isn't much of a story line / plot as this is definitely more of a character based book.