Liars is told from the perspective of Jane, a writer who meets and falls in love with a filmmaker named John. When they meet they both promise that they will never be a traditional, boring couple. They both want freedom. They both want to be free to follow their passions. But as their relationship progresses Jane realizes that John isn’t who she wanted him to be and she has become one of “those” women. The kind of women who fully submit to their husbands. The kind of woman who allows her husband’s desires to always be prioritized above her own.

This isn’t a groundbreaking story. We all know this story. If you haven’t seen it in one of the many books, tv shows, or movies that tell this story you personally know a woman who has experienced this. But Sarah Manguso told this story in such a straightforward, simple way that felt unique to me in its unflinching honesty. Every statement made in this book is extremely blunt. I really loved it. Even though this is a frequently covered topic Liars didn’t feel cliched or boring. It’s a quick but heavy read and its lack of structure seemed to reflect the haze that Jane’s life had become by the time we reach the end of the book. I’m not sure if that was intentional on Sarah Manguso’s part but it made perfect sense to me. I will say that I think this is a writing style that people who don’t read literary fiction might not be very comfortable with. I think it’s fantastic though.

I think stories like Liars resonate with me deeply because they portray one of my biggest fears. I started tensing up at Jane’s relationship with John from the fifth page of Liars. Only Five pages into this book, just a few weeks into knowing Jane, John was telling her that his ex girlfriend was “unstable” and obsessed with him. Once we learn early in the book that Jane herself is mentally ill it becomes obvious that eventually John will use that against her in the same way he did with his ex. And he does. Nine pages into the book John tells Jane that he wishes he was as successful in his field as she is in hers and this becomes a point of tension for the entirety of their relationship. From the beginning of the book Sarah Manguso starts showing the reader what kind of husband John would become. And from the beginning of the book the reader gets to watch Jane ignore COUNTLESS red flags. Because Jane herself is telling this story in the past tense she often implies that she now realizes that she missed a lot of red flags. I believe this added to the tension I felt the entire time I was reading this book. I personally felt a feeling of dread the entire time I read this because as I said this book is about one of my big fears. But I do believe that in showing John’s red flags so early on the author was trying to make every reader feel that sense of dread and knowledge that this relationship was doomed to be unhealthy from the start.

I have no criticism to give at all.

For all those heartbroken and divorced, you’re doing great, and you’re not alone.

Jane, a doe-eyed newly wed betting on a happy marriage, gets burned and finds herself in the process.

This story highlights the raw messy dark side of marriage. In a way, it brings comfort, and in others, it makes the reader uncomfortable to see pain and grief expressed in action. I highly recommend this book to any and all left heartbroken. If you have been burned, this book is for you.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hogarth for this ARC.

Wow. Just, wow. This was so much heavier and more intense than I expected, and it was full of so many heartbreaking and bitterly clear truths. Truths not only about what it means to be a woman and married, but also about what it means to subsume yourself for someone else. It was a very difficult read emotionally, but a very engaging and easy one in a literary sense. Manguso's writing style is very easy to fall into and while her characters were generally quite unlikable (even her protagonist who I was rooting for throughout did not do much to endear herself to me after her repeated ignoring of the reality of the situation she was in), I still found myself enmeshed in the story and unable to look away - despite having to occasionally take breaks from the reading to give myself an emotional break. This was a powerful story and I will definitely look the author up in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House/Hogarth for the ARC! This was a dark, twisted look at marriage and the concept of being a “wife”. Manguso’s writing was fantastic.

This book made me appreciate my husband and the life we have. Liars is a dark, unique look at marriage and how it changes both people involved. This book wasn't my favourite, based solely on subject matter, but I can see how many people would really like it. I would give it a go if are looking for not your typical book about marriage.

Liars is one of the most visceral writings on maternal rage that I have encountered. Sarah Manguso is a beautiful writer and her work is marked by incisive observations about what happens to a person when they swallow their rage for too long. The narrator of Liars is drained from the constant demands of motherhood. The unrelenting needs of a completely helpless being on both a woman’s body and mind intersect with her husband’s weaponized incompetence. As the decades spill over and her career ebbs and flows, the narrator finds herself unable to leave her narcissistic partner until he makes the decision for her. Manguso examines how the narrator was blindsided and how she makes sense of the choices and moments that shape her life.

There are many things that I enjoy about Liars. The writing is poetic and the characterization is strong. I was immediately invested in the characters and their lives. It is refreshing to read a story about motherhood that does not romanticize the experience. Although the narrator makes many beautiful observations about her child, there is no narrative that suggests that the child’s existence made all of the struggles worthwhile. In other words, the narrator’s life is marked by mental health struggles and they aren’t magically solved by having a child.

I was initially invested in the plot because it hits on a social commentary that I am fascinated by: Do hetero men hate women? The internet is rife with jokes and commentary about hetero couples hating each other, and I have always been curious as to why women stay with men who are terrible to them- who don’t even seem to like them. Liars charted this territory, but ultimately circled around for too long and lost my interest. At one point, the narrator comments that she is reading Philip Larkin and is tired of his incessant gloominess, and I had to pause my reading to make sure it wasn’t my own words manifesting on the page. The misery is so drawn out (almost 15 years of it!) that it is hard to feel sympathy for the narrator. Her husband did not make a slow reveal of his horridness. He was pretty terrible from the start. And yet, the narrator was constantly compromising her values and needs to accommodate the relationship. In that sense, this is an interesting read on the power of codependency and the pressure to check boxes- like marriage, home ownership, and child bearing. Unfortunately, it just missed the mark for me.

I think that anyone who has experienced maternal rage will consider this book cathartic. It is also appealing to people who enjoy reading about ongoing issues of equality within domestic spaces. It can also be great if you just need to rage about men who act like children. All perfectly fair reasons to enjoy this book.

Liars is the story of a tumultuous relationship — from “first ferocious hunger” to the “strange dread at suddenly being divorced” fourteen years later — as related by a woman whose successful writing career seems unthinkable in the conditions under which she worked: with a flaky and jealous artist for a husband, a need to micromanage all the details of their household, and the (not entirely unwelcome) demands of motherhood, Jane is still able to release some well-regarded work; using various grants and fellowships to pay for part-time child care so she can continue to eke out work. The storyline is not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it does jump along in fragments; highlighting all the lowlights of this relationship and making it very clear to the reader that we are getting this story only from Jane’s POV — and while she makes the case that she married a liar, someone “bad at gaslighting”, Jane tells us a few times along the way that she’s a liar, too (it’s not incidental that the title is plural.) This reads a lot like a memoir — I suppose any novel about a novelist does — so I snooped around the internet to learn about author Sarah Manguso’s life, and the major strokes line up. Whether or not the fine details are a faithful account of Manguso’s own marriage, Liars positively has the ring of truth: I absolutely believed that Jane would enter this relationship, and that even if she was lying to herself along the way, that she made the choice to stay in this relationship and work on it — to the detriment of her professional life and mental health — and the truthiness here was like a punch to the gut; you know this is the kind of chosen misery some people live in and Manguso explores it beautifully.

Liars, by Sarah Manguso, dives deeply into the married relationship of Jane, a somewhat mentally unsteady wife as well as a successful writer, and John, her husband who does something in film that we are never fully cognizant of. He vacillates between being successful and being severely impeded by his narcissism. There are some positive moments in the marriage, which is also heightened by the birth of "the child," whose addition to the family strengthens it and lends it some emotional vulnerability.

The plot of this novel is rather bleak yet realistic. The weak relationship lasts for 14 years, but we are aware fairly early on that John is indeed a liar, and that he has an interest in another woman. On the other hand, Jane is not as honest as she could be in her assessment of her role in the marriage, in spite of her efforts to make it work.

Manguso's clarity and writing style keeps the plot and the interactions of characters in this book of heightened interest, and it moves swiftly. In a less-skilled writer, the book might have moved more slowly and been influenced by the lack of a more clear or fully examined setting, but it is cohesive and true to its eponymous title.

Thanks to Net Galley and Random House for the opportunity to read this book.

A really dark and twisted novel about marriage, motherhood, artists/writers, the concept of being a "wife"-- at first I wasn't sure I would be able to stand pages and pages of the husband's narcissism but in the end I was impressed and blown away, as always, by Manguso's writing.

While the writing style as others have mentioned requires a bit of an adjustment period, I would agree that this novel is an astoundingly emotive and lyrical reflection on the 'nuclear family', albeit more suited to those who prefer a more fast-paced, 'train of thought' storytelling format.

LIARS is told from the perspective of an aspiring writer, Jane, whose creative spark is regularly extinguished under a cloud of compromise; this veil, among other grim complexities, defines the nature of her marriage to John, an egotistical filmmaker with near zero redeeming qualities. Given the disheartening nature of their relationship (arguably, from the start), it's difficult to attach reason to this continued suffering. But to many this is a reality- a long haul that presents as quite jarring to a reader with comparatively favorable relationship experience.

That being said, to those who question how easy it really is to fall into such traps, how easy it is to lose years of your life to this foggy 'autopilot mode', I'd recommend giving this a read. While I didn't quite connect with it, and thought the overall framework was a bit jarring, the novel still offers valuable insights and some thought-provoking statements, particularly toward the end, that resonated with me.

Thank you to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC for this book.

This was an enjoyable, yet uncomfortable read.

It felt very "Ducks, Newburyport" ish, in the sense that it read as a single train of thought throughout the book, although it was over several years rather than a few days. I loved the writing style and could see myself enjoying other books written by Sarah Manguso.

As a married (and childfree) person, this made me grow even founder of the man I married. You never know who the person you love will become in the privacy of your marriage.

It is a fast-paced novel, that will keep you hooked. It does feel a touch heart-breaking at times as I'm guessing more people go through this in their marriages than we imagine.

Synopsis (from Netgalley, the provider of the book for me to review.)
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A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labour of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.

A great read about the disillusionment of marriage and the perils of wifehood and motherhood - be careful what you wish for.
Decidedly literature or book club material and not for the most casual of readers --- very very feminist.
#shortbutsweetreviews

It took me a little bit to get into the narration and writing style, but once I did, I was sucked in. I could feel the emotions dripping off the page and felt Jane’s feelings like it was all happening to me. The description of the life she was living was so vivid I could see it all play out in front of me. I also appreciated the humor brought to the book which added some levity. I recommend this to any woman in a long term relationship.

I feel so lucky to have stumbled upon this unique, beautiful, highly memorable book. It was a pretty bleak read, but I couldn’t put it down because of Manguso’s lyrical writing style and her gift for arranging thoughts/paragraphs in a way that is downright haunting. This felt as real, detailed, and immersive as a memoir. I highlighted 41 quotes, and I look forward to reading more from this author.

Let me tell you, I read this book in one sitting. This novel perfectly encapsulates the journey of a successful woman who falls in love with a man who won’t love her back, a woman he reduces into a babysitter and maid. I think we all settle at different points in our lives in the hope that our silence will earn us more love, when in reality settling traps us and eventually destroys us in feminine rage. Manguso’s stream-of-consciousness writing is stunning and immerses you in the story from the very beginning. I could not put this book down even if I tried. I’m so grateful to NetGalley and Hogarth for letting me read this ARC, and I can’t wait to purchase a copy for myself once it releases! Well done Sarah.

This read more as literary fiction and was very heavy handed. The characters just weren't engaging enough.

Sarah Manguso's newest novel has the intensity of one of those stories that you cannot wait for it to end so you can feel some relief from the nearly unbearable tension. An intimate look at the inside of a devastating marriage that read as terrifyingly realistic.

Jane marries John who, from the beginning, no one is playing hide the ball here, really sounds like the worst. “If I had the energy I would leave him.” So there’s that.”

But instead she has a baby with him. A man asks “‘Why are you still with him?’ That’s what most people would ask if I told the story to them like that, in one sentence.” Well, sister, I’m about halfway through the book and I’m asking too.

Then she has cancerous cells. “I thought he became a sociopath but he hadn’t become anything.” Truer words never spoken, my friend.

This is the story of a woman, a marriage, a life. It’s so dark. And I’m afraid more women live it than we know.

Swallowed by motherhood and marriage, Jane juggles life as a wife, mother and writer. The novel focuses on her life with John and their son, and the downfall of her relationship with John, delivered though through almost diary-like entries of reflections of her days. It made for an interesting way to view their relationship, but took a little adjusting to when I first picked up the book.

Overall it was a tough but good read - uncomfortable content at times, but artfully written. It was pretty fast paced, mostly powered by Jane's palpable rage. The first half of the book or so had me hating everyone and internally shouting DIVORCE HIM every other paragraph, but that's sometimes how it is when you're painted a such a painful story about the burden of invisible labour and traditional gender roles in the home and hetero relationships in general. The Afterword section was cathartic.

The title of the novel and certain passages left me wondering whether how much the title was directed at John, and how much was shared by Jane, and I'm not sure exactly how to feel about that.

Best read when you're in the mood for something that will fire you up, if you can deal with the pity and sadness you feel at the same time. You for sure won't walk away without feeling something from this.

The description of the book seemed interesting, so I wanted to check the story out. Unfortunately, it is not working for me right now. It is nothing against the story or the author, but I couldn't get into the story/characters. I may try and find a physical copy to add the my library when it is released, though, because I think my readers could like it!