The lying liars who lie

A conversation with Sarah Manguso about her new novel Liars

When does the story of a woman’s life begin? It’s not when she is born, but it is the moment she breaks. The moment she snaps. The moment she allows her anger to wash over her in a tsunami of fury.

The late feminist and academic Myra Jehlen once wrote that “all women must destroy in order to create.” She adds, “No woman can assume herself because she has to create herself.” And this act of creation is not private, it’s public and it is political. And the expression of anger, too often neutered in narratives, is necessary to the process.

Sarah Manguso’s Liars is a novel about this destruction and breaking. It’s a finely told story of a marriage and so many of the betrayals that come along with it. It's a crime novel, except the crime is heterosexual marriage. It's a whodunit and the villain is the patriarchy. It's a brilliantly paced, gripping story of love and betrayal. 

I read Liars on an airplane while I sat next to a man, who would, at the end of the trip, break up with me in the airport at 3am, furious that my work and my attention swerved anywhere other than him. In hindsight, it would seem fitting that Manguso’s book was in my hand the whole time. Narratives that tell the truth with such unsparing honesty are always part of a demolition project. In the book, Manguso writes, "Elegies are the best love stories because they are the whole story."

I spoke with Manguso about her book, ambition, creation, and freedom. You can buy Liars today! You won’t regret it.

LL:  Your book is so brutal and unsparing a portrait of a marriage. Did you ever feel like tempering, like holding back, like softening the blow in the story?

SM: I wrote Liars in an absolute fury. Initially there were more violent fantasies in the book, and there was (even) more shitting. On the advice of friends, I curtailed those things. And on the advice of the Penguin Random House legal department, I took out a few other things that might have placed me at risk of being sued.

I think I’m about 10 years older than you, and I grew up having been sold a bill of goods for a new type of progressive heterosexual partnership that, for most of us, never materialized. I got married because I believed the hype; I didn’t know how deeply patriarchy had already poisoned the men of my generation, how most of them, even if they didn’t say it out loud, wanted traditional wives. I think the average progressive Gen X hetero woman went into marriage expecting a utopian partnership, and the average “progressive” Gen X man went into marriage expecting a cool wife.

So many men (of all generations) simply don’t recognize that women possess human subjectivity, that women aren’t here on Earth merely to serve as men’s admiring audience — like that guy on the plane with you, who probably likes the idea of dating a smart, ambitious woman and is then pouty when she doesn’t instantly transform into a meek little wife appliance. “Don’t you realize I’m on my hero’s journey and you’re one of my conquests? Stop challenging my ego! Waahhh!”

Like you, I assumed that any man who was attracted to me was attracted to me because of — not in spite of — my intelligence and ambition. But plenty of men are attracted to big game, women with public-facing careers, only because they like the challenge of reducing a strong woman to a bang maid. I didn’t fully comprehend that until after my divorce.

LL: At the heart of this story of a marriage is the question of whose work is valued, whose is appreciated, whose ambitions are seen as threatening. I know so many many women who are mothers, who were or are in marriages, where they've been thriving despite working full-time while also being caregivers, while the male partner has floundered and then blamed the wife and the children for his failures. (It's giving Anatomy of a Fall.) I wonder about your ambitions for your work? Your life? How have your ambitions changed over the years? What does success look like to you?

SM: I know quite a few women like that, too — successful despite worse-than-useless husbands. But I also know women who became wives and mothers and whose identities outside of those roles simply vanished. Too many kids, not enough resources, and the terrible discovery that that was what their husbands had wanted all along.

When I was younger I had a long list of specific writing and career goals. I didn’t want to get married or procreate; I wanted only to be a writer. Then, in my 30s, I met and married a man who seemed to want the same kind of life that I did. We were together for 14 years.

Now that I am a divorced single mother, my only goals are to maintain my health and solvency, raise my kid well, resist injustice where I can, and work on whatever book I’m currently working on. I think that shift is fairly typical; young people expect to conquer the world, and later on, after a few reversals, one realizes that the worthier goals, and the worthier successes, are often collaborative longer-term enterprises, larger than oneself. I would define success in life as making a contribution to the forces of justice and love; making deep connections to other beings; and leaving a minimum amount of garbage on the earth. But shorter-term personal goals are also good! They keep me going, day to day.

LL: Your book is coming out in a summer when books about women breaking are dominating the headlines. A lot of nonfiction, but fiction as well. What is going on? Are we okay?

SM: Women have never been okay! During the worst depths of covid, so many brilliant writers wrote about women (and people of color and disabled people and queer people and poor people and fat people and non-cishet people, et al.) not being okay, and at some point an intersectional critical mass was achieved. Writers like Jessica Calarco, who first said that women are America’s social safety net, paved the way for Liars and other such books to appeal to the commercial publishing industry, and I’m grateful for their work.

LL: I think your style of spare paragraphs that depict these small moments and thoughts, which stack like Jenga blocks until we have a toppling and terrifying tower, is uniquely suited to capturing a marriage. It’s so rarely about one big thing, but about the slow accumulation of so many small things. What were you reading and thinking about as you wrote this book? How were you envisioning stacking this tower of marital terror together?

SM: People love to say that marriage takes work. All over the world, domestic abuse victims are thinking, Wow, I guess this is the work that everyone’s talking about. When we don’t talk about what constitutes reasonable relationship work, on a granular level, we enable abuse. That’s why it was so important for me to pack this book with details. I needed to tell the story of this marriage — to show what covert abuse really looks like — in painstaking detail. Because it’s the critical mass of details that makes John’s abuse impossible to deny.

One of the things I read (and contributed to) as I wrote Liars is Tracy Schorn’s Chump Lady blog. Chump Nation is a community of literally millions of people who initially didn’t understand why, after having learned their spouses had cheated on them, they lost 10 pounds in a week, half their hair fell out, and they had heart attacks — or worse. And then they read the blog, and they learned that they weren’t crazy. They’d simply entered a shadow world of uncontainable trauma, of constant cortisol overload. Infidelity is abuse. It is sexual, financial, and emotional abuse. Tracy’s book is essential reading, and her community is a great big old-fashioned blogospheric mutually supportive chump army.

LL: I say terror, but it's such ordinary horror. No one is murdered. Nothing criminal happens. How do you keep that taut line of suspense so strong throughout the book? (I keep telling my friends it's a crime novel, but we know who the killer is; we just don't know if she will get away). How do you find that power in depicting the ordinary?

SM: I love your characterization of this book as a crime novel! Nothing criminal happens, technically, but in the UK, coercive control, an umbrella term that includes the kinds of subviolent abuse John inflicts upon Jane, was recently added to the criminal law code, with a maximum of five years’ imprisonment, and there’s a grassroots movement for our own country to follow suit. People who work with battered women frequently say that no matter how much a woman is physically assaulted, the deepest abuses are psychological.

Traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm; it was designed that way. But some readers see John as a cartoon villain, and they see Jane as a cartoon idiot. Those readers simply don’t understand how easily a man can reduce a strong woman to an abuse victim simply by marrying her and engaging in some casual gaslighting.

LL: I've read an interview where you said that once an editor told you to publish Ongoingness on a mom blog. Talk to me about getting your work, writing about the ordinary horror of life, taken seriously?

SM: The editor who told me that my book Ongoingness should be a blog post on Mumsnet eventually left the publishing field in disgrace; as it turned out, that micro-misogynistic aggression was not an isolated event in his professional life.

Every woman who has ever published a book has fistfuls of these stories; I’m sure you must have some. Here’s another one of mine: In his New York Times review of Ongoingness, Dwight Garner describes my books thusly: “Each squats on a perch between poetry and prose.” Squats on a perch like a broody bird, getting ready to squeeze out some shit-speckled eggs. Garner then says that I have a baby at the end of the book, which made him feel happy for me. That review is a veritable master class in how to fail to review a woman’s work in good faith. But with that guy I feel like I’m punching down, poor fella. It’s been 10 years, and I don’t think anyone takes that flavor of lazily kneejerk misogynist “criticism” seriously anymore.

LL: In another interview you talked about capitalism and the freedom to write being balanced with financial security. Talk to me about balancing the need to feed yourself and your kid with the work of making art? How has that worked out for you? What was it like writing this novel?

SM: I wrote this book in less than two years during a high-conflict divorce, and during lockdown, while being the primary parent to my young child, teaching part-time, and starting up a consulting business. I was a machine running on pure rage.

I have much less income now than I did when I was married, partly because California is a community property state: Though I receive some alimony, it is partly canceled out by the book royalties that I am obligated to share with my former spouse, who does not need the money and who demanded it solely because he could. But I am in charge of my money now, and though I have a lot less of it, I feel financially safer than I did when I was married.

You’ve written about the miracle of shared custody, which has given me what still feels like an incomprehensibly vast amount of extra time. In fact I’m already done with my next two books. I had no idea how constrained I was before. I’d love to keep writing and to keep being free.

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