Damn. If you're married this book will either move you to get that divorce you've been contemplating or give your partner a big ol hug and a kiss. Thankfully for me it was the latter.

This book reads so raw and real that I had to keep going back and checking to see if it was a memoir. It reads fast but also delivers a swift punch. A visceral study of what it can mean to be married and completely lose yourself.

“I thought, if I had the energy I’d leave him, and then I folded up that little thought, wrapped it in gauze, and swallowed it.”

WOW. “Liars” by Sarah Manguso is incredibly visceral. It’s sharp and biting, seeming to possess an auto-fiction quality that shapes the narrator’s candid voice. The loneliness, the exasperation, the bewildering love that seems to remain despite—until it doesn’t (“He gave me a look of love. I felt wonderful. Then I felt trapped”). I loved the complexities and contradictions, how human it all is. The reflections on being an artist and mother, how both can exist and how life opens and closes simultaneously with a child. The loss of self, the return of self. Ah, the rage! It is all felt here, all experienced by the reader. Also, it’s absolutely hilarious at times.

I’m thrilled for the upcoming release so that I can purchase a copy and write allll in the margins, because it is a book I wish to return to again, again, again.

Thank you, Random House, for the opportunity to read a new favorite!

I think the best thing I can say about this book is that it was short and over quickly. It's a miserable story with huge generalizations and while I wanted to cheer for the main character, I was furious with her for the choices she made in her life. We all make questionable choices, but to make the same ones over and over is not a fun read.

The writing was so juvenile and abysmal, that I couldn't get past the first few pages. I hate being so critical of what's probably a first-time author, but this book reads like a YA novel.

I finished this novel in a single day. It has the raw, propulsive energy of Manguso's nonfiction. A story about marriage and motherhood, in which the former is a torturous trap, the latter a softer trap shrouded in genuine love. Manguso's writing is gorgeous and incisive. Her descriptions of Jane's daily life with her child are stunning. It reminded me at times of Maggie Smith's "You Could Make This Place Beautiful"--although Smith's memoir treats marriage as a complicated partnership in which both spouses sometimes fail, while this novel presents marriage as a brutal train wreck in which only one person--the evil, no good, very bad husband--is solely responsible for the carnage.

As much as I enjoyed this book, I did sometimes want to throw it across the room. There were some cheap, simplistic generalizations of men: "maybe the trouble was that men simply hate women" and "Not one of my married friends had a spouse who wasn't impossible most of the time." Most puzzling was a page-long monologue about women's impossible lot in life that was so similar to the monologue from Gerwig's Barbie film that I wondered if Gerwig and Manguso had traded manuscripts during the writing of their respective projects. It seems that the narrator lives in a weird bubble of women who marry men who are somehow are still living in the sixties. John is ia pretentious, slovenly cheater who sits on the couch playing video games late into the night, doesn't do laundry, and insists on moving across the country about once a year for his series of jobs, (Yet, he can't be as much of a loser as the narrator portrays him to be; it does take some effort to secure millions in startup funding and run a company with 100 employees).

Part of what makes the book hard to put down is that the narrator, Jane, seems completely unaware of her own part in the dissolution of her marriage. The entire novel drips with contempt for the man who serves as Jane's less intelligent, less talented sidekick. She seems to think she married down. "He wasn't an executive; he was a manager. His companies had failed, and his once nascent film career had run aground. And I was a woman who had tied her wagon to this man." While he is out making a living, she is mocking him for not being a more successful artist. Jane complains about trips to the "boring" beaches of Mendocino during the lockdown, when many people are trapped in tiny apartments. She complains that the white bread John buys isn't the right bread--which she told him needed to come from the health food store, not the grocery store. After the divorce, she complains that she has to give him part of the proceeds of her books that were written during the marriage after the divorce, yet she says he makes hundreds of thousands more than she does, which means he is paying her more in the settlement than she is paying him.. She seems to feel that she is entitled to his earnings, but he is not entitled to hers, which feels like a very backwards view of feminism. She complains that he tells their friends she takes too many meds, yet she pops "tranquilizers" as if tranquilizers are something people just normally keep around the house, like a sixties housewife.

It's a rage-filled book about the terrors of marriage and the liberation of divorce. The rage brilliantly burns up the page. It's also a book about trying to make art when the demands of domesticity threaten to take every moment of your time and every ounce of your energy. Many women have been there. Many have done so without the benefit of fifteen to twenty hours of childcare per week, a partner's good salary, and health insurance. Jane seems oblivious to the enormous socio-economic advantages afforded her by class and by the marriage she despises, advantages that allow her to continue writing long before the writing pays the bills.

As you can see, this book got under my skin, as the best books do.

Liars is an odd book. The way the story is written is not at all traditional. It's choppy. The language used is uncomfortably crude. The story is depressing.

Jane and John are married and have a child. John is capricious in his career, and in most of his life. Jane has generally given up her whole life to be a wife and mom. They are not happy. Jane is close to miserable most of the time. Throughout the book, Jane contemplates her worth as a wife and mom. John continues to make poor decisions. The last "chapter" of the book is sad and disturbing.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read and review Liars.

I cannot say I would recommend this book to the general memoir or lit fic reader. To me it seemed written in the blaze and seething rage of divorce aftermath, the type of thing you write in a for your eyes only journal or perhaps burn after writing. Perhaps those who have gone through similar circumstances will reap something to commiserate or console herein. Personally I scrambled to cull some sort truth learned or a glow behind all the shadows, hoping it would be the child and the relationship of parents working through this separation with him. It felt so heavily weighted in condemning and labeling and self exaltation at points that I was unable to see the forest for all the trees on fire with rage.

This is a chronicle of the death of a marriage foretold. From the start of the book we’re told Jane’s marriage will last 14 years, yet her telling of the story is a litany of red flags from the moment she meets John.

This way of telling the story ultimately didn’t work for me. The novel has no internal rhythm, just a cold rage driving us from the start of the relationship (John is jealous of Jane’s writing fellowship and seeks to undermine it) to its rocky end. Which is partly the point, but it reads like the wife’s pre-therapy story—she’s blameless, he’s a narcissistic, gaslighting monster, and we can’t understand why the marriage lasted so long (or why they had a child!) because every slight, every frustration from at least about year two, is given the same emotional weight in the telling. It’s a cautionary tale—should she have run screaming when he couldn’t handle her artistic success? Probably.—but not believably the whole story.

It’s hard not to read and review this book from a place of, where do I relate. And the foggy inertia of certain seasons of life as explanation in itself is real, but I just didn’t buy it as sufficient to explain why this relationship didn’t break until it did.

Does this read like I’m criticizing this book for not having been a different book? Maybe that’s fair. But this is all to say that while “portrait of female rage” (the husband does seem like he sucks) is a kind of legitimate story to tell, it’s not actually a very interesting one for being all conflict, no depth, and I’m not sure the first-person retrospective POV is actually the best vehicle for it. It’s well-written though and maybe will work for you, dear reader.

Thanks @netgalley @penguinrandomhouse for the e-ARC. This one’s out in July.

This was NOT an easy read! Sarah Manguso understands the darkness of marriage and the inequality, anger and sadness that can be present. She skillfully, using direct and powerful language, crafts a story that I'm confident many women can relate to. While this novel is dark and difficult I'm so grateful the author was up to the challenge. This was a worthwhile read, one that will sit with me for awhile. It lingers....and causes me to reflect and wonder....

Liars is a spare, contemporary novel narrated by Jane, a New York writer, who is trying to get a tenure-track teaching position. She meets John, an artist from Canada who also can write, make films, take photographs. Sparks fly. They seem to want all the same things in life. When the topic of marriage comes up, Jane balks, fears losing herself and her writing in the marriage, particularly if there were ever to be a child. But they do marry, and Jane tells herself the marriage is great; they have a son, who is eerily referred to only as “the child” throughout. That impersonal reference made me feel Jane is an unreliable narrator, because what mother who appears as devoted to her child as Jane said she was would not call him by his name? Oh, yeah, the title is “Liars.” More than one.

John is a quintessential narcissist who evades the truth as much as he blatantly lies. He drinks too much, he spends too much money they don’t have on extravagant things while telling Jane there is little money for essentials, and she is still dealing with managing his debt from before they were together. He is jealous of Jane’s writing success and begins tearing her down, while he himself starts and loses a few businesses, drags Jane and their son from city to city, coast to coast, which ruins her chances of ever becoming tenured. And then John eventually leaves her for the woman who was married to his high school friend, while trying to paint Jane as mentally unstable, a narrative he has been laying the groundwork for throughout their marriage. We get an inkling early that Jane is a liar—lying to herself and the rest of the world about how great her marriage is. But John reveals himself as the constant liar, master manipulator, gaslighter extraoridnaire as time goes on.

Ms. Manguso does not romanticize marriage or motherhood via Jane. There is nothing uplifting about this story; “gloomy” comes to mind. But it is nevertheless a fascinating take on female anger—Jane takes to throwing bricks at a wall in the yard of the rented home when John enrages her, so then she can contain it and go back to pretending everything is okay. When she can no longer pretend, she stays for the sake of the child, for health insurance. Then John blindsides her. The writing is tight, in very short, smart paragraphs. It was unsettling to me at first, but then I was drawn in.

Thanks to NetGalley, Hogarth Press, and Ms. Manguso for making this ARC available to me.

This was so haunting and gorgeous, and true. But also sort of anxiety-inducing so maybe not for everyone. Parts felt very Jenny Offill which I adored. Ugh this was good!

"Liars" reads a bit like overhearing an angry couple fighting near your yard and thinking, geesh, enough already. I'm sure many people will wonder if this is autobiographical fiction since so much of the novel feels quite real and, like Leslie Jamison's "Splinters," the child, the only child of the couple, is always referred to as the child, as if to protect the child's privacy. Throughout the fast-paced (until it feels repetitious and the readers wonder why our narrator doesn't assume her husband is having an affair with his long-time friend() novel of their eleven years of marriage, we see them occasionally happy, usually bickering, yet, the mother is devoted to her son. We don't see the husband, except through the eyes of the wife, so when they father and son are off at a park or wherever, we don't really know how they interact, but we do get the feeling that the mother and son are the solid unit in this threesome. Our main character is a writer, a writer who becomes a housewife and regrets not having time to write, time to pursue an academic job, because her husband makes the money, though he also loses the money, and endless jobs, causing them to move frequently, which leaves the wife unsettled and depressed, something her husband uses against her since she takes tranquilizers frequently and has confided to him how she had been in a psych ward twenty years ago. After they finally divorce, one wonders if this woman will really remain unmarried, as she suggests now and then in the novel, and if the handymen that come to her house service more than the house, and her hand continues to satisfy her, I am sure many readers are hoping she does avoid marriage in the future because one gets the feeling she will be much happier on her own after reading this unhappy account of this marriage.

Manguso’s slim volume of precise prose reads like autofiction as she dispassionately describes the end of her fifteen-year marriage to John who’s cheating. “When you’re a liar, you always know something that other people don’t know. Maybe lying to me made John feel extra smart.”
But no one gets off the hook as the narrator admits: “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,” hence the title. Her reactions are visceral and compounded by the questions her young son asks.
I welcome another Manguso.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I really like Sarah Manguso's writing, her nonfiction above all else. I think this book has all her trademark wit and aphoristic style, although at times I felt this story of a bad marriage--and this isn't necessarily meant to be a plotted novel--moved in a way that felt monotonous, as bad marriages can be. That said, I will read anything she writes.

This book is stunning. It has Manguso's signature style-- short paragraphs set off with white space. Here, to devastating effect. The arc of the relationship in this book is troubled from the start. We want Jane to see John's sabotage clearly, but most women will relate to seeing what we want to see, what we so wish was there. I found myself cheering her steady literary successes-- another book published, another lecture delivered. One wishes that she could have been free of John sooner, but the pleasure of his leaving at last-- and taking his weaponized incompetence with him-- was considerable. It's a gorgeous exploration of a marriage, wobbly from the start. I did yell at Jane when she kept agreeing to move with John, but I was also yelling at myself, but I knew I'd go too. I was grateful that Jane's relationship with the child wasn't as sentimental as it could have been. I also loved Jane's friends and her reference to every wife she knows being miserable. I don't have that kind of marriage, but I easily could have. I wondered about Jane's troubling use of tranquilizers and John's alcohol (ab)use, but it wasn't necessary to the story for those to be resolved or directly exposed. I'm a huge Manguso fan, and this book is one of my favorites.

DNF - I wasn't able to become immersed in the story due to the writing style. I liked the concept of this plot but, I don't think I'm the target reader here.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book, however I did not have an opportunity to finish it. I did not connect with the characters as well as I would have liked and I just could not bring myself to finish it.

Liars is painful. It took me a bit to get into the flow of the story, as the writing is less typical paragraph first or third person style of today's fiction and instead comes in shorts bursts and spurts. It very much fits with the discourse of what's happening in John and Jane's marriage, where everything feels sudden and also so very predictable. I think some people are going to find Jane unlikeable, not understanding why she would stay with John, why she continues to acquiesce, move across the country, support their household – sometimes that's just the unbearable burden of being in those roles.

Raw, witty, clever but a tough read because of the topic and we all know marriages like this. Men like this. So many. If you don’t, maybe read more books like this or pay more attention to those relationships around you. So many are dressed up to look pretty. I appreciated how SM covered the subject. I recommend this and thank you NetGalley and publisher for this ARC. 4.5 rounding up

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a memoir about a marriage. The pain of betrayal resonates deeply.