Jane meets filmmaker John when she’s just starting out in her writing career, and the two fall in love. After they marry, Jane is convinced that she has found what she’s always wanted in a partner. But it isn’t long before Jane finds herself lost in the marriage, subsumed by John’s own ambitions and ego, and she finds that all she has to cling to is being a wife and mother. When her own career starts to take off, their marriage suffers - and then John leaves her.

This tightly written novel will get under readers' skin and they won't be able to shake it long after the book is finished. Reading this novel was like watching a car crash in slow motion (except instead of a car crash you’re watching the most claustrophobic and toxic marriage explode), and the further into the marriage the story got, the more claustrophobic readers will feel. Even when the actions of the characters veer into the downright perplexing, it's masterful how intentionally deceptive the storytelling is and how the book’s title plays into the fact that readers will never really know who is telling the truth - and who might be editing the details to make themselves look better. Compelling and upsetting. Perfect for fans of books where the narrator is unreliable.

not really for me, but i really appreciate having the chance to get an arc. I just could not get into the story as much as i thought i would.

Manguso does such a great job of showing you what a great marriage can look like--then have it blow up in your face--what do you do then? This is such a well crafted book that makes you really feel for the characters and their pain. Worth all the acclaim.

This book should come with a warning label: “Contents May Provoke Uncontrollable Female Rage.” Liars tells the story of Jane, an aspiring writer, and John, a filmmaker and gaslighter extraordinaire. Their relationship starts with Jane ignoring red flags galore, and it manages to go downhill from there: John’s ego and ambition (combined with laziness for a real treat) as well as entitlement, alcoholism, and manchild syndrome leave Jane sidelined, juggling a kid, a house, and her dwindling sense of self. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s not here to coddle you.

But here’s where it might lose some readers—it’s a lot. Manguso leans so heavily into the rage and resentment that the book can feel suffocating. There’s brilliance in the prose and some sharp insights about the ways ambition and parenthood can strain a partnership, but the tone stays relentlessly in the red zone. It’s as if the marriage itself is only seen through a lens of disillusionment, without room for nuance or, dare I say, hope. It’s a bold approach, but one that risks exhausting you instead of enlightening you. If you’re game for a visceral, no-holds-barred dissection of a marriage on the rocks, this might be your jam—just don’t expect much light at the end of the tunnel.

Thank you @netgalley for the Advanced Reader Copy of Liars by Sarah Manguso. It’s the story of a marriage, told from the wife’s point of view. She is a relatively successful writer, but the husband does not succeed. And he is abusive, but for some reason she stays. I DNF’d this book, just could not get into it. I didn’t like the characters or the writing.

I read this book a couple of months ago and I still think about it today.

It’s now one of only a few books that I really want to re-read so I can go back and annotate it more deeply, though I did tab some of my favorite writing and moments that I found relatable.

It would make for a great book club discussion, as it’s quite thought-provoking. Full of the female-rage vibes (that I’m loving lately), it has a lot to say about toxic relationships. It’s dark, blunt, and empowering.

Would definitely recommend if you like:
🔥Feminine rage
⚠️Toxic relationships
🧠Thought-provoking discussion
💪Dark yet empowering

Y'all know I love complicated marriage novels, so when this novel was being publicized with the tagline "marriage makes liars of us all," I immediately pre-ordered. Three months later, I'm finally sharing my thoughts, which *still* aren't fully formed. This novel is a very specific terrible (TERRIBLE) marriage. As I read, I couldn't tell if Manguso was trying to tell a story of a common marriage or not. The characters were not ones I could relate to. The writing was fantastic. I'm always drawn to reading women rage through writing, and Manguso rages. If this is marriage, why would anyone get or stay married?

If I have to read one more book about a woman struggling with having it all and being mad about not being happy about it, I just might lose it. This was a DNF for me

This book was infuriating to get through but in the best way! Was I angry the whole time reading? Yes. Did I want to throw the book at a wall? Yes. But did I love it? Also, yes. This book is perfect companion novel to Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante.

Liars by Sarah Manguso, a quick read if you enjoy relationship drama.
The entire book is based on a relationship between Jane (a writer) and John (an artist, do it all). They meet, marry, have a baby and somehow have a marriage if you call it that.
This is a book that sums up the definition of a toxic relationship. It makes it hard to review because it was a book that I got mad at but then wanted to see where it went next. Jane was a character that would irritate me with her complaints but then you wanted her to find herself as well.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the arc for my honest opinion.

📖 Book Review 📖

📱” Liars" by Sarah Manguso

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
Published July 23, 2024

Thank you Netgalley for this eARC

Can marriage and a nuclear family destroy a woman? Two artists meet- Jane is a writer and John is a filmmaker and think they want it all- a creative career, happiness, beautiful home and eventually children. 

Jane's career takes off and John is left in the dust, so he leaves her. I found the book sad, and depressing as it made marriage seem so temporary. 


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Sara Manguso
Liars: A Novel
Hogarth, 2024

Oh, I am so thankful I double-checked the book details before I began writing about Sara Manguso’s tour-de-force novel Liars (Hogarth, 2024). Why, might you ask? I forgot it was a novel instead of a memoir. And when you are rolling along in the final chapters of Manguso, fired up or in deep despair with her (I mean, Jane), it is a challenge to shift gears and remember that this is a novelization.

Sara Manguso. Phew. One of the best writers. “300 Arguments” (Graywolf Press, 2017) is not required reading for “Liars,” but it prepares you for the concision and mastery of language right at her fingertips. Not to imply that it is magic or witchery instead of work, though I do like to think there is a bit of a spell or two cast onto her semantic wonder.

“Liars” is the post-mortem of a fourteen-year marriage. Our narrator, Jane, is a writer. Her husband, John, is an artist who becomes a salesperson/entrepreneur/cross-country job one-ups-person. Did she know as early on in their relationship as the book portends about the potential fractures that lay ahead?

Our view of their courtship, marriage, co-parenting, and demise may seem single-sided or weighed more favorably towards Jane’s experience. John’s lies are more egregious (financial, adulterous, public vitriol). However, Jane’s interiority and ability to examine her emotions and the actions of those around her implicate her as a liar to herself or in the greater scheme of marriage. Wifedom. Motherhood. (Not that I believe there is generous support in place for any parents or that parenting or marriage is easy.)

Fans of any of Manguso’s other work, or Leslie Jamison, Maggie Smith, or Miranda July, should enjoy “Liars: A Novel.”

Thank you kindly to Sara Manguso, Hogarth, and NetGalley for the eARC.

For some reason the description of this story struck me as being a domestic thriller rather than literary fiction. Because of that misunderstanding, I was a little outside of my preference genre-wise and yet I have really enjoyed the few lit fics that I've read over the years so I was hopeful.

This one was a hard one to enjoy.

Don't misunderstand, Manguso's writing is masterful. Her prose is very poetic without being too purple or flowery. Her use of allegory and visceral imagery to describe the mental state of her protagonist, Jane, who is watching the slow dissolution of her marriage, her ambitions, and every hope she had for her life is striking. I very much shared her rage in these pages not only toward her useless husband John but also towards the systems in our world that reduce such brilliant women to shadows of themselves.

However, as can be the case with literary fiction, so much of the story was the stream-of-consciousness of Jane's inner monologue that there was very little room left for any plot or character development. Jane deserved some kind of redemption or at least catharsis and I felt like she got neither. If she changed at all, it was only in the sense that she accepted that awful turn her marriage and, as a result, her life took. While her son was clearly a beacon of light in her life, I hated that he was only ever referred to as "the child."

Overall, this one fell short for me. I don't mind books without a happy ending but with not even a hint of hope coming out of this one, it's a tough one to recommend.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy!

Liars by Sarah Manguso is an intense portrait of marriage that reads like a memoir. The writing is so searing that the reader truly feels immersed in the narrators point of view and emotions. Highly recommended for readers interested in another 'divorce' or 'men are awful' memoir/novel. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

i loved a lot about this book: it's cutting and miserable and tightly written. i read it in a sitting. i just think it did the lows too hard and the middles and highs not at all.

it's one of those books that comes down to whether i liked the end, and i don't think this stuck the landing. but i will be following this author!

As a librarian, I would add this one to a book discussion group. It's well-written and completely maddening. It brings up important questions of ambition, artists, marriage, and trusting a narrator.

Stunning prose and economy of language, powerfully rendered claustrophobic and oppressive universe. This made me feel like I was going to die, in the best (and worst) ways.

I am torn in my rating for this book. A marriage, motherhood, personhood and trying to deal with all three with little help from one’s partner can be frustrating for sure. In this book we follow a marriage and a woman who tries desperately to find some self satisfaction that doesn’t include always giving in to keep the peace. Women, more than men, though I know there are men who do, are the ones making excuses for their partner and swallowing frustration that this is what they need to do.

I like the short segments, thoughts but this is a one sided conversation. We hear from the husband only through her. What ever stage you are in in your life, there are parts, I think, to which most women can relate. But, and here’s the but, by books end I found it to be self indulgent. Dost though protest too much.

ARC from NetGalley.

"Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless."

It is a scathing indictment of marriage and what some need to endure endlessly. A young woman becomes infatuated with a young artist, and they soon move in together and marry. This is where the trouble begins. Narcissistic, selfish, jealous, and financially unstable, she endures all of this simply to have a family.

Probably one of the most infuriating books I have encountered in a long time. Endlessly yelling dump himeosnt change the narrative. This is the signal for the whole man's disposal service, yes, the entire man.



Favorite Passages:


“Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. ”

“I laundered vomit-soaked sheets until the dryer broke and then took two wet loads to the laundromat, which as usual was full of heroic women.”

“I thought about all the wives who had lived before birth control, before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape and domestic abuse, before women could buy a house or open a bank account or vote or drive or leave the house. I wanted to apologize to all the forgotten and unseen women who had allowed me to exist, all the women I’d sworn not to emulate because I’d wanted to be human—I wanted to be like a man, capable and beloved for my service to the world.”

“But I also knew that the most intimate relationship is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child. The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body, the teaching how to lift food to the mouth, how to speak, how to show love according to the feeling of love, how to put on a shoe, how to pick up a spoon, how to wipe one’s own tears, how to piss and shit and be clean. Nothing, nothing in the world like that. That absolute authority of which the baby must be convinced in order to feel safe, separate from the mother’s body. The honor the mother must give the baby, when the baby is ready to know that her absolute authority was never real. The careful timing of the revelation that, baby, you are alone, as alone as anything can be. How lucky you were, baby, to have been a baby with its mother. Now you are ready to start living life in the imagination, to start imagining your way back to every good feeling you don’t quite remember from the days of milk.”

“I hadn’t experienced uncontaminated time—time unoccupied by vigilance to the child’s health, feeding, elimination, education, safety, entertainment, development, socialization, and mood, and the care of the house, including food shopping, meal planning, cleaning, cooking, tossing old food, scrubbing bathrooms, making doctors’ appointments, labeling toys for show-and-tell, planning play dates, maintaining contact with grandparents, planning holidays, paying bills, dealing with two tax audits and an identity theft (all John’s), and usually most of these things at once—outside an airplane in years. This meant absurdly little of the sort of time needed to write books. 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. Which might have been the reason I was so angry, I thought.”

“I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.”

“John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.”

“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.”

“Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.”

“That’s the problem with women like us, Marni said. We don’t die. When I tell people I look forward to dying, they don’t get it. I’m just fucking tired. I’m not going to kill myself, but I’m ready to rest. When I went on vacation I went snorkeling and couldn’t move. The current was too strong. But it was just beautiful underwater. I thought, Well, if this is it, it’s not bad. Then the stupid boat guide saved me and gave me a hundred bucks.”

After hearing a lot of buzz about LIARS, the newest novel by Sarah Manguso, I was so excited to receive an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publishers, Random House Publishing Group - Random House | Hogarth.

LIARS tells the story of a wife in crisis as she navigates motherhood, marriage, cross-country moves, mental health challenges and more. I really loved Manguso's writing and characterization, however the book as a whole was not my favorite. Some of the plot and writing I struggled with, and just generally this fell a little flat for me after all the buzz. Some may really enjoy it, but it was not the book for me.