Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars (Hogarth Press, 2024), opens with a daydream: Jane is a thirty-something woman house-sitting in Upstate New York. She walks along the Hudson River, writes by the fireplace, and fantasizes about who she might become.
“I pretended I was fifty years old and had published many books translated into many languages,” she says. “I imagined seducing the beautiful young men who installed satellite dishes and fixed cars and lived in my neighbors’ converted stables.” Then, a film festival comes to town. It brings with it Jane’s future husband, John, and the end of the daydream.
Liars is a marriage story. It’s barely a spoiler for anyone who reads the first page—or the book’s title—that the story is an unhappy one. When they meet, John is a promising young(ish) filmmaker-photographer-writer-entrepreneur, while Jane’s writing career is just starting to take off. She never wanted to be someone’s wife and later concedes that she once looked down on women who have bridesmaids, change their surnames, and call their partners “hubby.”
Jane can’t explain her reversal on marriage. From the moment she meets John, she allows herself to be swept up in the current of his wants and needs. “How interesting,” she says, “the future had disappeared. I wondered what would happen next.” Jane marries John the way a lobster walks into a trap: once inside, she can’t find the way out. He is the sort of man who expects the benefits of a traditional marriage—in which his wife is his mother, housekeeper, accountant, and assistant—in addition to the benefits of a more modern marriage in which his wife contributes financially to the home. “He said that since getting married he felt he’d lost a weight he didn’t know he’d been carrying,” Jane says. Many readers will know this man well.
Soon, Jane is not only a wife but also a mother. Like marriage, motherhood isn’t something that she ever pictured for herself. Unlike marriage, motherhood cannot be undone. Manguso writes often in Liars of the body knowing essential truths long before the mind catches up. Jane’s body seems to know that John is not a real partner, and that having a family with him will be a point of no return, well before her mind is ready to confront this reality.
Once Jane does have their child, she is overwhelmed by the weight of this new responsibility that she, like so many of her peers, carries alone: “All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do,” she says. “After all our education, after having been told that we’d be able to do anything, after having children in America.” We know this woman and her experience well too. It’s no accident that Manguso names her characters after the Doe pseudonyms.
One of the main questions Manguso explores in Liars is whether a person can be this kind of wife while being anything else. John reasons that it’s easy to be a writer since all one needs is time, but his aspirations have a greater potential return and should therefore take priority in their life plans. Jane barely resists. In pursuit of these tenuously held aspirations, John is constantly moving Jane and their young child across the country, chasing shiny new job prospects, getting fired an impressive number of times, and destroying his wife’s ability to get a stable gig in the process. He ignores Jane’s growing anger and deteriorating mental health, abandoning her to the unpacking, the cleaning, the cooking, the caregiving, and the bureaucratic minutiae of family life.
It turns out time is not so easy to come by for a writer working under these circumstances. Marriage and motherhood become like invasive species that coil around Jane’s career, leeching her of energy and creative drive. John discourages her from accepting teaching jobs and fellowships while also needling her for not making more money. Jane wonders whether he actually wants her to work, or whether he would prefer that she be dependent on him. The answer to this question is obvious to readers, to Jane’s friends and family, and even to Jane herself, and her rage quietly grows as her agency over her own life vanishes inside of John’s whims.
Jane’s primary coping mechanism is to lie to herself about what’s happening in her life. “It felt good to love and take care of the child, to love and support my husband,” she says when people without children ask her if she is happy and routinely suppresses the mountain of evidence to the contrary. Jane holds onto her cover story at all costs. It’s all she has.
Manguso’s prose is, as ever, nimble and precise. She writes Liars in the first person from Jane’s perspective, a choice fitting for a protagonist who internalizes most of the anger, shame, and humiliation that she feels. The novel’s intimate point of view is supported by a narrative style that has Jane stuck in a dreadful loop of housewifery, self-delusion, and mining for shreds of time to write—all while enduring one indignity after another at the hands of her husband. By cloistering the reader inside of Jane’s head, Manguso expertly cultivates a claustrophobic, lonely, angry atmosphere. The reading experience is often a punishing one, and we can feel the weight that Jane is carrying. “I read a book by a woman who had never married or had children,” she says in a poignant callback to those early scenes by the Hudson River. “I wouldn’t have amounted to much anyway.” If John’s fondest wish is for his wife to dream of being nothing else, he is succeeding.
At the end of the novel’s first act, John and Jane have the conversation during which one of them finally (finally!) says the words “I want a divorce.” From here, Manguso wields the first-person, closed-loop narrative style to an entirely different effect. Jane is still furious, but she’s no longer a passive actor. As she reconsiders stories she’s been told of “great men with crazy wives,” Jane decides that “inflicting abuse isn’t the hard part. Controlling the narrative is the main job.” For the first time, there’s a sense of Manguso looking past Jane and toward her readers. Her purpose becomes about ensuring that, even if only in fiction, this one wife gets to tell the story.
It’s no surprise that John weaponizes the “crazy wife” trope against Jane. During a mediation session, he describes her as “volatile and unsafe for the child to be around.” The mediator tells Jane that John sent her a text: “Did Jane tell you about her willing institutionalization and bipolar medication?” Naturally, this is a badly distorted version of Jane’s health history, and she later learns from a mutual friend that John “always explained that I was profoundly unstable, deeply crazy, and had even been hospitalized.”
Jane submits into the case file of their marriage John’s credit card statements, call and text logs, and screenshots from their shared computer. She cross-examines him via email, where she asks the same questions repeatedly and goads him into putting important details in writing while pointedly omitting his version of events from the record. John tells Jane that he kept a “marriage diary” that would supposedly explain all of her faults, but she “did not seek or find that document.”
With this novel, Manguso delivers a devastating and clarifying account of what it means to be in a zero-sum game in which the wife will always lose. Just like in the beginning, the paths that Jane and John take after their marriage are easily recognizable. John finds another woman to fill Jane’s place. Despite its burdens, it seems there is someone willing to play this role every time. Jane and their child are left behind to survey the damage and heal. The divorce doesn’t offer Jane total absolution, but it is a relief: “I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage,” she says. “It felt so good to stop lying.”
Liars comes amid a wave of new literature from women authors reconsidering traditional marriage, the role of the wife and mother, and embracing divorce—including Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Notably, Liars is the only work of fiction here, though the stylistic choices Manguso makes lend the novel a hyper realistic tone. These stories are especially urgent in a time when the conservative movement is hollowing out women’s reproductive rights and in which right-leaning state legislatures are actively trying to make it harder for women to get divorced.
Liars will leave a puncture wound. It makes sense that, in the end, John is starting over with someone new who he’s presumably promised to love. For her part, Jane once told a friend, “If I outlive this marriage, I will never be with a man again.” I believe one of them.
