Sarah Manguso

Liars by Sarah Manguso is a very highly recommended scathing portrait of a marriage. Due to the brutally honesty revelations of the relationship Liars is not an easy novel to read and for some readers it will bring up painful memories or experiences.

Jane, a writer, meets John Bridge, a filmmaker, and the two fall in love, marry, and plan to continue to both have fulfilling, creative lives. When their child is born, Jane is thrilled, but is also thrust into the role of main caretaker, and show more cleaner, while John is often absent, doing what he wants. She is now a wife and mother whose life is overtaken by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego. Jane says, "I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing." John frequently moves them all across the country as he pursues new jobs, another form of control, while never admitting to any mistakes.

Jane tries to keep her writing and marriage going throughout all the upheavals. Her health suffers, both physical and mental. She says something that many women face, "My time, which is to say the time that was mine, for me alone, had disappeared. And at once I understood why I hadn't felt like myself in years. My own time - my own life - had disappeared, been overtaken." The novel follows their 14 year relationship. Readers know John will be divorcing her. It is clear from the start. Jane is the narrator of the story and includes within her account, her personal writing about the issues in her marriage and how marriage can make liars of us.

Honestly, this is an impeccably written but an emotionally draining novel to read, especially if you have experienced some of the same things Jane did. I appreciate Manguso naming her main characters John and Jane, common names, and having the child simply be the child. Many readers will be projecting themselves and their personal experiences into the lives of the characters. I saved many quotes from Liars, including this true fact: "He said that the clearest indication of cheating was contempt on the part of the cheating spouse."

Liars is presented as fiction, but while reading it does not feel like fiction. It feels like a realistic, raw memoir about a failing marriage. Thanks to Random House/Hogarth for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.
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This is the story of a bad marriage that lasted fourteen years. John and Jane are both working in creative fields, she as a writer, he as a visual artist, when they meet, fall in love and marry, determined to have a marriage of equals. That's not what ends up happening, and each time Jane settles into an academic job, John finds reasons they should move and she ends up managing his life as well as the household and the childcare of the baby he wanted and she didn't.

The novel is told from show more Jane's point-of-view and she is angry. She sees herself as responsible for everything, but in control of nothing. She dreams of leaving and has friends who tell her how much easier her life will be without him and she believes them. But she stays, losing control over her own decisions and agency. The reasons spouses are unable to leave damaging relationships are not present here; she has her own career, albeit diminished by the needs of his career, and often earns more than he does, there are no religious or cultural pressures for her to remain where she doesn't want to be.

This book is really sharp; both clever and painfully cutting. There's no part of this disastrous relationship that remains off limits. It's an interesting book to read as a married person -- there are parts that slice close to home, other parts that left me enraged, mostly at John, but sometimes at Jane for remaining so resolutely passive. The novel is an indictment of married life, yes, but also a very specific case study, one that omits any good, any reason to make a life with another person. And it makes for gripping and thought-provoking reading even as I thought it was sometimes heavy-handed. show less

“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, show more 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 for staying, displaying a degree of contempt for John that rivals his for her. She has a child. (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 Do we really need to know about her bowel movements? And forget the euphemism “making love” or the plainer “having sex.” You won’t find those here.

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. However, the narrator does come to terms with 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 wanted to try 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. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, it is only after she’s learned of this sorry excuse for a man’s lengthy affair with a married high-school friend. It is his outright rejection of the narrator, his decision to leave her, that finally does the trick. “John’s betrayal,” she observes, “was a gift. My last bits of romantic silliness, all burned away.” 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. show less

"Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of a self."

At the age of 20 Sarah Manguso got a cold that would not go away, which turned into an ongoing weakening, which turned into years of devastating illness. Eventually, after changing doctors, she was diagnosed with an extremely rare autoimmune illness, chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP) which is a kind of supercharged form of show more Guillain-Barre. I guess I should say it is like GB on steroids because massive doses of steroids was part of the only protocol to bring the disease under some control, and those steroids led to other serious and permanent physical harm, including suicidal depression that landed Manguso in a locked ward. The other main parts of the treatment were aphersis (having her plasma completely removed and replaced), and having infusions of gammaglobulin and other meds. For most of those years her life was no life at all. Though she pushed through and graduated from Harvard only one term late, and started her MFA at Iowa, she spent most of her 20's, living in her childhood bedroom barely able to move, too exhausted to even read or watch TV, unable to even roll over in bed because of the port implanted in her chest. Manguso walks the reader through the experience with a remarkable lack of self-pity and even more remarkable candor. The author is living through this thing, but also there is an eerie distance, like in bad movies when the spirit of a person in a coma hovers over their body and looks down at their inert form. It works here though, it is not cheesy or alienating, but rather sort of surreal. She says she needed to wait to write this until she had been in remission for seven years, and I expect that helped give her that remove. The experience is related in short vignettes framed around treatments, caregivers, and her own body. The whole is beautiful and magnetic. show less