I’ve seen many glowing reviews for 𝗟𝗜𝗔𝗥𝗦 by Sarah Manguso. Sadly, this isn’t going to be one of them. 𝘓𝘪𝘢𝘳𝘴 is narrated by Jane, a moderately successful writer and poet. She’s married to John, an artist with more ambition than actual talent. At the start of their relationship, Jane feels nothing but joy being in a marriage of artists. That contentment doesn’t last long.⁣⁣
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As the realities of marriage and eventually parenthood take hold, neither is important enough to drive their marriage. Instead, John’s relentless pursuit of his own ambitions steer their union on a path of demise. ⁣⁣
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The title is apt. In so many ways John is a liar, but so is Jane. More than anything, she lies to herself and that’s where this story broke down for me. I grew less and less sympathetic toward Jane as she cycled through her grievances over and over and over. It began to feel like a punishing stream of consciousness that in the end had me intensely disliking both characters.⁣⁣
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I’ll suffice to say, 𝘓𝘪𝘢𝘳𝘴 just wasn’t a book for me.⁣⁣
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Thanks to @HogarthBooks for an electronic copy of #Liars.⁣⁣
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This was everything that I was expecting All Fours by Miranda July to be. I still liked All Fours but this was taking that same idea and condensing it down to its essence. I inhaled it in one sitting and will definitely be buying a copy at some point so I can highlight and annotate the hell out of it.

I have rarely felt so driven to violence over a fictional man as I did while reading Sarah Manguso’s latest novel, Liars. In it we meet Jane, an aspiring writer at the start of the book, who soon takes up with handsome filmmaker John. They’re both artists and seem to want the same thing: to be in love, to find success from their creative ventures, and to be happy. Oh, hold on a second, scratch that — John says he wants that, but in actuality what he wants is: for Jane to be in love with him, for him to find success in his creative ventures, and for him to be happy. Whatever Jane wants or does is secondary. (Or at the very end of the list.)

Unfortunately Jane doesn’t pick up on this until it’s too late, until their lives are so intertwined (a marriage, a home, a child), that facing the realities of their relationship is out of the question. And so, she lies: to John, her friends, to her parents, and most importantly, to herself. That doesn’t stop John from leaving her, of course, but for a while it’s enough.

Liars is full of so much rage and wit and pieces of perfect prose that my copy is now basically more highlighted passages than not.

John is a man in constant turmoil at the mere thought of being less successful than his obviously (bold, italic, underlined) more successful wife. It’s not enough for him to have his own professional success; he has to cannibalize Jane’s for himself, too. (See: trying to insert himself into her prestigious fellowship in Greece, taking over her tutoring sessions to offer her students his own bad advice, sabotaging her plans to attend conferences she’s invited to, etc.) Coupled with his deep well of jealousy towards his wife, is the fact he’s essentially weaponized incompetence in human form (“I taught John how to open and sort all his mail: shred, trash, file, action items. I found a coupon for free document shredding. I dealt with the action items. All he needed to do from then on was sign checks and documents.”). I kept hoping the story would end with Jane murdering John. (No jury would convict!!!!!) Alas.

As Jane detailed more and more anecdotes of her husband’s behavior, my blood pressure level likely reached the upper millions. Manguso’s blistering account of this unfair, unfulfilling, unraveling marriage is as enraging as it is insightful, letting Jane’s bleak (and depressingly commonplace) situation speak for itself rather than offering judgement or commentary. (That’s left for us readers.) Two stand-out bits:

“As I unpacked, prepared to teach a class, and cooked myself dinner, I thought that maybe John would do something nice for me since I’d done so much for him in the past few weeks. At nine he called, drunk, having gone out with a friend, and asked me if I’d made dinner yet, and could he have some.”

“By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of John’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed. John had gotten up and taken a shit.”

Does that not make you want to hurl this man directly into the sun? Good lord.

It’s one of the first novels I’ve read that so expertly touches on the invisible labor that women perform, even in so-called ‘happy’ or ‘well-adjusted’ marriages. It’s simply what is expected of us, an expectation that only heightens when children enter the equation. That’s part of what made reading Liars so infuriating (in a good way) — just how normal, even mundane, Jane’s situation is.

My TikTok FYP is routinely full of women making 15-part video series about the repeated deceptions they endured from their cheating, undeserving husbands, or women trying to sell the ‘trad wife’ fad, swearing up and down that giving up their success, ambition, and autonomy really was the best choice, they swear. (See: Ballerina Farm.) What makes it somewhat worse for Jane is that I don’t think she ever saw it coming. That’s the kind of thing, the kind of marriage, that happens to other women — women less smart, less creative, less ambitious. Not someone like her.

Like a frog in boiling water, by the time she realizes the truth of her situation, it’s too late. And so, her lies are her life raft.

Shout out to NetGalley and Hogarth books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

A vicious story of marriage, at least marriage when one person is not pulling their fair share. Writer Jane imagines a life with her husband John, but the reality is crushing as she fights to keep her version of self.

#liars #netgalley

A story of a marriage disintegrating, bit by bit. Pointing of fingers, the understated and overstated of little things that drive both partners crazy. It was such a good wake to see this from an outside, reader perspective. There is nothing extraordinary of this story, but how it was splayed out for the reader was brutal.
Thank you to Netgalley and Hogarth for the ARC!

This is definitely a case of right book, wrong reader. It's getting rave reviews, and I can understand why – Manguso depicts a reality of marriage in all its complexity and challenges. For me, it was just too bleak. I also think that not being a mom impacted my ability to connect with the story. I didn't find either of the main character redeeming, which isn't always a problem for me, but when paired with the other issues I had, this just didn't work. But there are MANY people who feel differently, so please seek out some more positive reviews before deciding if this book is for you or not.

Liars chronicles the birth, life, and death of a marriage. The text reads like a list of grievances from the viewpoint of a gilted wife leaving the reader wondering how the couple ever ended up together and why they stayed together for 10 years. Compliants about the husband range from minor (biting down on a glass shard he unintentionally got in the family dinner) to egregious (carrying on a years-long affair with another woman). Despite years of providing almost all of the childcare, household management, and emotional labor to the relationship, the protagonist finds herself used and spited by her husband who spreads rumors about her mental health to gain sympathy for leaving her. In sparse, but powerful language, the novel builds a feeling of irrefutable rage and indignation with each page.

This book is a work of auto-fiction, the author herself having divorced from a marriage due to her husband's infidelity. Her experience feels at once singular and universal. I doubt there are many women reading this who won't find a part of themselves on the page. This novel is a reminder that we aren't alone in our anger.

Such a good read that I enjoyed! I'm so glad that I got the chance to read it early and will definitely be recommending it to multiple people who enjoy these types of novels. I enjoyed the characters and especially enjoyed the writing by this author. I'm excited to see what the author comes out with next as I'll definitely be reading it! Thank you to the publisher for my early copy of this book!

Liars by Sarah Manguso is an anxiety-inducing yet captivating portrait of a marriage that is both highly relatable and deeply suffocating. The book offers an honest and raw portrayal of a woman feeling overwhelmed and undervalued, highlighting the unfair balance that often exists in relationships. Manguso’s writing is excellent—so compelling that I found myself reading through it quickly, even as the intensity of the narrative made it hard to breathe at times. This is a powerful read for anyone interested in the complexities of marriage and the emotional toll it can take.

This was a dark, engrossing page-turner that was at times deeply frustrating. It forces the reader to really think deeply about the labour women do in marriages and to question why this is. Truly evocative, powerful writing that has stayed with me.

This book is incredibly impressive in its raw, unadulterated anger. In its feeling of suffocation, of being forced to be the kind of person you don’t want to be. I can’t say I full understood Jane’s character, given that she’s an unreliable narrator lying to herself about her lying husband, but I really enjoyed the journey of her righteous indignation. I especially like that after all her griping and dreaming about ending her marriage, it is John who does the leaving. The injustice of it is kind of delicious, but it is this very injustice that finally breaks the cycle for Jane and makes her see that she doesn’t need her anger anymore.

What writing! I am a sucker for anything that really looks at a marriage and this delivered. I felt almost sucked into their relationship from page one and never wanted to put the book down.

Brace yourself, or at least I did, for a gripping work of fiction that reads like a memoir of the daily life of a marriage and its disintegration. A woman being taken down by her husband who is nothing but a bully.

Written in a unique format apropos of the husband’s behavior, in synch with an accompanying emotional brutality. Go in with a mindset that this is not an easy read, it’s more a brutal character study. Joan Didion is whispering, or perhaps shouting, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
I felt such strong emotions toward these characters. Seething, angry, sad, empathetic. Everyone is a liar. We, the reader, see the truth, but are we complicit in the lies?

An unflinching gut punch.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for a chance to read this magnificent novel.

An inside look into an unbalanced marriage, providing commentary on the untenable expectations placed upon women/mothers. Of course, made even more insidious with an emotionally (and kind of physically?) abusive partner.

The lies we’re told and the lies we tell ourselves and how those lies upend our sanity and our lives.

I couldn’t stop reading this despite a racing heart and presumably elevated blood pressure from how angry John made me. The writing is so good. The layers being peeled back in such a smart way.

The protagonist of Sarah Manguso’s latest, Liars, released yesterday in the U.S., is in a terrible marriage. Her husband, a serial liar and manipulator, doesn’t value either the work she does as a writer or the work she does as a wife and mother. She really ought to get a divorce, before it’s too late.

But of course, by then, it’s already too late. She doesn’t hear the reader clamoring for her to take a swift exit. She’s too convinced she can last it out, that she can make it work, that she can contort herself in any direction in order to fix the broken relationship or change the broken man.

She, after all, is a promising career woman. She writes, she publishes, she lands teaching jobs wherever they suddenly move (thanks to her husband’s mercurial career). And then, of course, there is her pride. Being a wife, she says, wasn’t something she particularly wanted to do, but “I knew I’d be very good at it.” Turns out, that counts for a lot.


Of course, this is a novel, so “too late” is an inevitability, with the marriage souring beyond recognition — an outcome so obvious that the reader senses it from the first few pages. But that part of the story is sort of beside the point. It’s the horror of how the narrator gets so deep that makes this novel — this plunge down the rabbit hole toward certain demise — so simultaneously terrifying and upsetting.

She casts, over and over again, the role of “wife” as a costume she is wearing and marvels that no one knows she’s pretending. She was just going along with things, for a while — like giving up full-time work to take care of their child, like caring for their cat and taking care of the house and planning meals and tending to all the various expected and unexpected needs of those who rely on her, day in and day out, leaving her next to no time to work on her craft. That wasn’t who she was, she was not really somebody’s wife, in the epithetical way Manguso uses the term in the novel.

And yet, the rules still apply:

All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do, after all our education, after having been told that we’d be able to do anything, after having children in America. We’d all assumed we’d continue our lives as before, and that the only difference would be a child or children silently napping in bassinets or playing with toys while we worked. We hadn’t known we’d be holding grimly on to screaming, incontinent, vomitous creature twenty hours a day.

Because that’s the propulsive horror of a story like this — a story that does feel like it is grinding an axe while also confessing to… something. It’s the familiarity. It’s the way that middle-to-lower-class stay-at-home-mothering does not discriminate against whether your partner is supportive, involved, or emotionally available. The average, or the common denominator, still includes you. The wage gap, the invisible labor, the default parenting. And if it’s not you, it’s a mother that you know, whether she’s told you or not. The familiarity of the protagonist’s rage, and her helplessness in the face of it, is a slow-motion car crash. You know what’s going to happen, sort of. You stay for the particulars; you stay to see how she figures it out.

While I enjoyed* this devastating and depressing novel, I'd like to start with an apology to my partner for the attitude I "may have had" while I was reading Liars by Sarah Manguso. With every page, Manguso reignited every frustration, disappointment, and regret I've ever felt on Earth, living as a woman and a mother. It set my skin aflame. It gave me a stomach ache. It made me rage.

"A wife is an animal. The animal wanted violence." I wanted violence for just over 250 pages.

Jane is a modern woman, an artist who isn't sure married life will suit her. But with John, a fellow artist, it seems possible to have it all, to have a marriage and break the traditional patriarchal chains. How wrong she was.

One of my favorite things about this book is how Manguso crafts the characters nondescript enough to make them the every-woman, the every-man, the every-child. I became Jane, my partner (and every man I've ever known) became John. The child became my child. I felt their story in my body, viscerally. I felt every wrong ever done to me done by John.

I loved the commentary on how we, as a society, fail women. How we ignore, chastise, and blame mothers. I loved how fragmented the writing was. I loved how flawed Jane was and how her irrational decisions (i.e. staying in a toxic marriage) were believable and even kind of understandable. I love how much of a gut check this book was. But ultimately, I'm grateful the book was a short read (my molars appreciate it now that I have unclenched my jaw).

This was a powerful book but one I'll have to tuck deep into my psyche if I am to continue to exist in our patriarchal society without losing my goddamned mind.

*I use the word "enjoy" loosely because it was somewhat of a torment.

This book was intense in the best way. I loved the writing style. I got pulled right into the lives of these characters. As the book went on, it read more and more like a memoir vs fiction. Beautiful writing, difficult to read at times. I've recommended it to my female friends who have struggled with marital challenges in one form or another.

Wow! What a powerful read this was. This was my first read by this auther and I really enjoyed her writing style. It made for a very hard to put down story. I wanted to jump through the book at times to choke the MC's husband. So much gaslighting! It left me with lots and lots of feels for sure!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

'Liars' follows Jane, a talented writer in her mid-thirties who meets John Bridges, an aspiring artist and such, romance ensues. We follow their life together as Jane struggles through becoming a housewife and mother. I would not want to give anymore details as this is a story that just has to be read blindly. (But please check for any warnings on possibly triggering content!)

This story was so realistic, I had to constantly remind myself that this was fiction. This reads like a series of diary entries and feels so extremely personal. It is full of poetic, honest, and heartfelt prose about womanhood and reflections once you've found yourself living a life you never expected nor wanted. As the story continues, the writing style develops in such a gorgeous and meaningful way. Before this, I was completely unfamiliar with Manguso's work but I her other titles will be entering my TBR immediately!!

2 stars seems generous for this story.

Jane is married to John, who is an awfully selfish and self centered man, yet she thinks she is lucky to be married to him. I thought he was awful, that she was either blind to his faults or a glutton for punishment. He never lifted a finger to help anyone but himself and she just picked up the pieces and moved on telling herself she was lucky to have him. She needs a course on how to take care of herself instead.

It read like a diary of every bad thing that happened in their marriage. The good things were so few; was that all the good they had? If so, why did she stay? What made her think he was worth the many cross country moves for his work, yet he kept getting fired from his own companies and just resented her success.

There really was no reason for me to finish this, but I did to see if it ever got better. It did not.
Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy. Honest opinions expressed here are my own and are freely given.