Thank you to Net Galley and Random House/Hogarth for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This novel was told in the first person about being a wife, mother, and a writer from the perspective of looking back on a relationship - how it happened, how she felt and the mess at the end of a relationship which eventually makes liars out of everyone. The telling feels more like a memoir and I believe is a bit of autofiction. The writing is precise, cutting and to the point. The voice of the narrator is powerful.

"It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry."

I was absolutely astonished by this novel, and no surprise, as Sarah Manguso's writing and storytelling are simply next level. I looked back and saw that I had highlighted practically half the novel - there are simply so many outstanding passages of prose here that require remembering and sharing. This is seemingly fiction but in the way Rachel Cusk's writing about women, marriage and motherhood is auto-fiction, this stunning novel may be as well. The "Liars" in question are both parties in the marriage - Jane, who is outwardly pretending her relationship and subsequent marriage to a 'too-good-to-be-true' guy is just fine and convincing herself that things will work out, and John, the charlatan who traps and deceives her. After the relationship's inevitable breakdown, Jane muses: "John gets to lie about me, forever, to anyone he wants," She no longer has control over how the relationship is remembered on his side.

Liars is about a horrible relationship and a man using weaponized incompetence to maintain or advance the status quo of his position in life, and the behind the scenes of the wife who's trying to forge her own path while struggling to keep everything afloat. I devoured this novel, wanting to see how things turned out and fearing for the worst. I thought, it certainly can't get worse for Jane? But there are poor decisions made and consequences that follow. Jane writes: "Hope with me, I wrote to Hannah. But I wasn’t doing anything as useless or dangerous as hoping." You are compelled to keep reading thanks to the excellent writing and expert hand of Manguso.

This novel will make you angry and want to raise your standards for what a relationship ought to be, and joins the canon of literary fiction about women scorned, along with Lisa Taddeo's "Animal," Ottessa Moshfegh's "Eileen" and Elena Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment." Highly recommend!

3.5 (rounded up) ⭐️

This is a great exploration of just how toxic relationships can slowly deteriorate the very best of you.

I love how this novel tackles how our main character sacrifices her own career goals for motherhood and her husband - and how much he doesn’t.

It’s a familiar tale, but each new take is welcome.

Loved this book about the anger that’s boiling inside a wife and mother who is putting her family’s needs before her own. Very relatable.

Stream of consciousness on a bad marriage.

I am struggling rating this because despite highlighting several well written passages, Liars took me forever to finish. I just found myself not interested in it. At some points I thought, "is this not the right time in my life to relate to this?" But in the next thought I was like, "I don't ever want to be in a time to relate to this."

Its a defeated snapshot of feminine rage through the lens of a writer who is just crushed under the weight of motherhood and a marriage to a piece of shit.

I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it and I will probably forget about it.

Thank you Netgalley and Random House for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

I tried reading this and really struggled to get info it. I love the premise, and was hoping for real and raw conversations, but the way it was set up just didn’t catch me or make me care.

The dissolution of a marriage that seemed doomed from the start. This rang too true not to have been experienced first hand. The author has a talent for writing about damaged family units, but this one contained too much sensory detail, and elimination of real data (e.g., names of the 3 family members were either eliminated or codified), to be fully fictionalized. The biggest liar here is the narrator, lying to herself even in this first person account. Claiming she envisioned a long marriage with this man, walking slowly and carefully together into old age. Despite remembering and recounting the numerous examples of his narcissistic self absorption and jealousy of her growing success as a writer. I was reminded more than once of Nora Ephron's Heartburn. Without the recipes.

Jane is an artist, a writer. She meets John, a filmmaker. They have an immediate physical connection, they sneak around (there's a crazy ex that won't leave him alone (of course there is)) and eventually they get married.

Told from Jane's perspective, we're in her corner even as she's relaying the mundane passive aggressive and insecure, insensitive behavior John exhibits. Red flag warnings galore! Run, Jane, Run! They have a kid, referred to as "the child". She doesn't run. She is trapped.

The book is brutal, raw, cold, funny, and heartbreaking, a marriage under the microscope. John is a jerk, an insecure and selfish slob to whom Jane, for what it's worth, is still attracted. We can see it with each transgression. He's a lie bag, but she's lying too, to herself, staying in the relationship. Until he leaves.

I was having a visceral reaction to Liars and realized it was triggering memories of my own marriage to a man-child a million years ago. So, kudos to Manguso for capturing something so universal and real. Fair warning to readers that it might be triggering!

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the digital ARC.

This was an interesting novel as readers will enjoy determining whose perspective is reliable in the story of a crumbling marriage. Manguso is a talented writer as her style and tone are strong throughout the story. The author was masterful at pulling you inside the mind of the protagonist, including the moods, the self-loathing, fears, resentments, denials, and searing confessions.

𝑰 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒈𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒍 𝒐𝒇 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈.

This is a marriage falling apart, a woman named Jane is exhausted being the adult in the relationship, the parent who is always present, and sick with anger that she has given up so much to follow her husband across the country as he changes jobs several times. Her husband John is always traveling for his career, and there she is at home and ashamed of having needs. As he loses jobs, he blames her for not having one, never mind the full-time task of raising a small child and part-time teaching she squeezes in. Her writing is falling by the wayside, when she has time, she is worn down, starved for sleep. She envies the freedom of John’s trips, the luxury of sleep, the escape from demands. Even her bowels must be relieved at night, out of necessity, because there isn’t a chance during the day. But John laughs, not comprehending the need to defecate on schedule, why would he? His time is his own. They are meant to be a team, but he never plays. She has been sticking it out, as John breezes through, happy, carefree. Look at the wife, running around like a madwoman, juggling tasks… and all the while he sits and watches, does not help.

It held such promise, their marriage, in the beginning. He would fund his art by running a production company with his friends, she would have time to write. It didn’t turn out as they expected, circumstances of her life are slipping through her fingers as is opportunity, like the artist’s residency she gives up while John chases his big dreams. Rage is making its presence known, but she buries it, as we do. Buckles down, keeps it together.

She copes with serious illness, a pandemic, tries to seal the cracks in her marriage, tolerates John undermining her, shamed for her mental health struggles because she is ‘crazy’ she is always to blame right? She plays the role of wife despite the fact her husband lets her drag the weight of it all. As their marriage lies withered and dying, she learns of his betrayal. Enraged at the time and energy she spent trying to maintain a long, mature love, she betrayed her own needs. The lies in this marriage… that are told about her, to her, and that she has been telling herself. But there is glorious relief when it stops.

This is the end of marriage, but there is still life, and a beautiful boy. One day the pain will just be a faded scar.

Sarah Manguso’s writing is bloodletting, perfect for anyone who has felt trapped, betrayed, or bamboozled by love. It is also a cautionary tale for those with happily ever after fantasies. Hell of a read!

Published July 23, 2024

Random House

Hogarth

10/10 no notes. I LOVE auto fiction—especially when they are astute, scathing, raging treatises on the barbarity of being a wife. What a force of nature book— even though it’s quite slim. Trust me. Just read this.

Sarah Manguso writes with witty precision what it means to be a woman, particularly within the realms of modern marriage and motherhood. The prose is honest, raw, unflinching and hits more marks than we're often aware of. Liars is uncomfortable, painful (which is the point), but also full of hope. It's a book that seeps under your skin when you're not looking, that many, many women will relate to. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the opportunity to read this terrific eArc. 4/5 stars.

Oooh this book is rage-inducing!! It's a super quick, very readable book. In fact, it's the kind of book that is really easy to just keep reading and reading until all the sudden you're done. But beware, if you're a woman reading this book, your blood pressure will likely increase and you may find yourself very stressed out. I am married to an incredible man and don't have kids and even I found myself getting very upset!

Jane is a writer whose success feels imminent. She meets John, also an artist, and they fall in love feeling like the perfect match. But from the start you can tell John is already getting jealous of Jane's successes and Jane is already making excuses for him and trying to make him feel better about himself. His career and whims guide their life and they move back and forth from coast to coast several times, forcing her to become more reliant on him as she can't commit to her career. They have a child together and almost all of the work is left up to her. If he does anything at all, he expects excessive praise and thanks.

Sadly, I think nearly every woman will be able to relate to this book. Even those of us in great relationships with men who are nothing like John. While it's easy to look at this from the outside and criticize Jane for making excuses for him and not getting out from the start, I think most of us can also see why she doesn't. We can detect the gaslighting, the ways society is set up for John, and the ways in which women feel stuck and try to justify it all away.

This "novel" is written like a personal journal, which is, in part, why it's hard to put down. Beware, I found myself getting annoyed at my husband for little things after reading this, but also simultaneously felt so grateful for him!

Thank you to Sarah Manguso, Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read the ARC of Liars. Any review is voluntary and reflects my own opinion.

I had a hard time moving through this book. The writing style was difficult to follow. The character of John was just horrible. Jane had a career, but allowed John to basically steamroller over it. I was definitely the wrong audience for this book as I literally was pulling my hair out reading it.

2.5 stars. I know there will be readers who will find this book to be insightful, personal, and even cathartic. But for me, it was a hard finish. While this book prioritizes the way in which we lie to ourselves and how others lie to us for the sake of marriage, motherhood, and the nuclear family, we follow a couple, Jane and John, who both seem to play their part in ruining their marriage. Yet we only get Jane’s perspective.

As I said, there will be others who can truly relate to this character feeling unseen, and yet still very committed to their marriage and to motherhood. But for me, I found this book to be plain and ultimately repetitive and easy to disconnect from. At times I was wondering if the narrative goal of this book was to only make women accountable for the faults of men. As we see Jane stumble along through years and years of being discontent, unhappy, and unheard in her marriage, cleaning after her husband, taking care of a child, and ultimately he’s the one that decides to leave.

This book felt distant and familiar, and we know that this happens a lot in everyday life: women who become breadwinners, women who are funding not only the household but their husbands’ lives as well. It sucks when you see it in real life, so reading it in a book format that felt like a journal wasn’t enjoyable. I think this book would’ve been so much better if it took a different approach on this topic. Instead of just dulling along with Jane as she makes excuses to stay in an abusive, controlling, and unsatisfactory marriage, it would’ve been great to explore sides of this issue that weren’t so literal.

I would recommend this book to others who are used to an overabundance of stories and tales that promote motherhood and the traditional aspects of being a wife while glossing over the sacrifices that are often taken on by women. While if you’re used to a more multilayered and diverse perspective on these topics, this book will feel okay at best. I think I just kind of went into reading this with higher expectations, and while you can clearly see the author's talent, I just didn’t care about what happened to these characters beyond them being unlikable for their own obvious reasons.

The decisions Jane made I couldn’t stand by. And part of that is the point of the story, as I stated before: the narrative seems to guide you in a way where you are meant to take accountability for the situations you put yourself into. And ultimately ask the question, what are we willing to put ourselves through, and what are we willing to lie to ourselves for?

Self-Deception Mixed with Jealousy

From the beginning of this novel, I could not understand why Jane, the narrator and published author, would continue a relationship with John. He used and abused her, manifesting his lies and failures with great pain directed at her. Why did Jane persist in hanging on?

It was a lopsided relationship from our first introduction. He took advantage of her generosity, money and often did not tell her why he was late or absent. I wondered how much self-deception she could withstand. I guess, a great amount of embarrassment and loneliness. He doled out his jealousy and dismissed her success.

We knew how Jane felt about the lack of money and tidiness. His various business ventures ended in career and financial disasters. The marriage was a struggle and yet Jane tried to create a perfect relationship. Instead, the relationship was headed for a homelife of disaster. Jane seemed to be on the brink of self-deprecation and anger. Yet, the story was invigorating and deliberate.

My gratitude to NetGalley and Random House for this pre-published book. All opinions expressed are my own.

I don’t what I thought this book was about when I downloaded it but I’m so glad I did. This is a story of a woman who during the course of her marriage (to a jackass) finds that she is losing herself and her career.

This was a super fast read - I think I read it over the course of 2 days. It was hard to put down and flowed so smoothly it was easy to just keep going.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for providing me with an advance copy of this book.

Available July 23, 2024.

Sarah Manguso's latest novel is a force -- the writing is juicy, poetic, and intoxicating. This story about a marriage that burns to the ground left me enraged and breathless. I can't wait to share it with friends and recommend it to our newsletter audience (225k subs) this month!

Manguso’s latest is a standout addition to the canon of novels about the plight of the woman artist and, more specifically, the artist-wife-mother, for whom there is an inevitable tension between a creative life and a domestic life. Manguso follows the arc of the relationship between Jane, a writer, and John, a Canadian multimedia artist. When they meet at a film festival in upstate New York, Jane felt “dull when I remembered that John could write, draw, and make photographs and films, while I could only write. I wondered if I’d feel like a failure next to him.” John was not deterred, announcing that “he’d known right away that he’d spend the rest of his life with me.”

From this auspicious beginning -- a seemingly progressive relationship among Gen X equals – the couple struggle with career competition when Jane wins a fellowship that takes her to Athens. Jane harbors petty annoyances (John couldn’t spell the word “necessary” or write a coherent paragraph), and is resentful when John explains that they are not engaged because he could not afford a ring, but then purchased six custom shirts after borrowing eight thousand dollars from Jane and asking for more money. Jane complains: “I needed him to share in the housekeeping, to have one date with me per week, to have two intimate sessions with me per week, to socialize with friends biweekly, and to pay me back the seven grand that he still owed me.”

Time goes on, and Jane becomes “a real wife, the one thing I’d sworn to myself I’d never be.” A pregnant Jane financially dependent on John “felt dangerous. Even using the word husband felt unsafe.” John became depressed working at a bank instead of being an artist, and he claimed that his depression prevented him for caring for the baby. John created art on weekends while Jane was relegated to running errands and doing chores. Money is tight, but John buys comic books, overspends on fancy cheese, and runs up a four hundred dollar tab at a restaurant because it was an “experience.” Jane is disappointed with how little she is able to accomplish with a child. Speaking for educated women whose careers were derailed by motherhood, Jane says, “We hadn’t known we’d be holding grimly on to screaming, incontinent, vomitous creatures twenty hours a day.” John accuses Jane of being angrier than other women. “It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.”

Tensions continue to ratchet up as John’s various business ventures, several of which fail, cause the family to move multiple times, thwarting Jane’s ability to work outside of the home while John seethed that she was not making enough money. Jane feels that “the child was still the only reason not to kill myself.” Her life had disappeared while John became more openly contemptuous of her.

Manguso writes of the unraveling of a marriage with unbridled fury (I learned that she began the novel just days after her ex-husband walked out of their 14-year marriage). Jane had felt empowered until she realized that her apparent autonomy did not extend to the domestic sphere, particularly when her artistic ambitions are shelved so that she can tend to her selfish and irresponsible spouse’s fragile ego. Manguso has written a sardonic, caustic, merciless, honest, unflinching, and deeply human novel that captures the disappointments inherent in even a successful marriage. Thank you Hogarth and Net Galley for this barnburner of a domestic novel.

This might be the first time that I’ve given such a high star rating to a book that angered me so damn much.

Why did it anger me? Because the main character is dumb and her husband is a trash bag. He was trash from page 1. And then there are 272 more pages of the MC wondering why she decided to become a wife because it sucks so much, and I wanted to shake her and explain it’s because she married a dung beetle.

So why am I giving it 4 stars? Because it is written so breathtakingly well that I was in awe the entire time I read it. Each line has so much insight and nuance - the prose was perfection.

So yeah. I wanted to throw this book against the wall. But it contains some of the best writing I’ve read in years. Read at your own risk?

Thank you to Hogarth Books and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for this very confusing review. Liars is out today.