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.

There is lying to yourself and there is lying to others.... Which is the most damaging?

Liars is a gripping, thought provoking book that evoked emotion. I wanted to pull Jane aside and have a private chat with her about putting herself first, making boundaries, and moving on. Liars is an intimate look at a woman who is an artist, a wife, a mother and her marriage to John.

When Jane met John, they were both artists. Jane was an aspiring writer and John was a filmmaker. Their relationship leads to marriage. Jane thought being married would be bliss as they both wanted to be successful in their careers. Jane thought she would be happy. But she soon found she not only put her happiness aside but her aspirations as well to follow John all over the country as he chased jobs and criticized her for her success.

This is not a happy book but a look at the downfall of a marriage. It is about what we allow, what we overlook, and how we lie to not only others but ourselves. This brought up a lot of emotions for me. I felt sad, angry, worried, and sad again.

John was a horrible husband and person. Man, did he push all the buttons and then some. This book is intense as readers watch a woman struggle with her marriage, betrayal, and the toll everything takes on her physical and mental health.

This book is equally gripping and heartbreaking. The author puts emphasis on the story and less on the names of the characters. There is Jane, John and their child (The Child) who is never referred to by name. Readers will observe Jane feel so many things ranging from love and happiness to rage, depression and hopelessness. I thought the author did a tremendous job of depicting all these feelings and emotions and the situations in which they occurred.

Whew! This is a heavy book but so worth the read. I didn't want to put it down and found it to be a fast and addictive read. I have a feeling that I will be thinking about this book for quite some time.

This is a story about Jane and John but let me tell you it's no ordinary story. Before you decide to pickup this book make sure you have the time to finish it one sitting. There is literally no option. You will be sucked from page one. I had no idea what to expect when I picked it up. This writer literally leave the pages on fire with quick fast dialogue and scenes that burn off the pages. The basic story is a woman who meet a man named John. He's not perfect but she stills says with him even tough her better insticnts tell her to get out. They decide to have a kid and move back and oforth from the east and west coast because he's a kind of guys that always has a new job that he thinks will make them rich. The crash and burn and she still stays with him. As you're reading it you wonder why she still stays with him. This is a book that you can easily relate because there is not a person on this planet who has not gone through issues about the people we date. As I was reading it I was like I know people just like this. The ending is one where you will love or hate but after finishing this book you'll want to tell your friends to read it and then have a converstaion about it. Thank You to Random House and Netaglley for the ARC HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!

Manguso portrays a relationship falling apart so carefully in Liars. When relationships end, it always feels like it could catch one by surprise, but the story here is like detective work: finding little pieces of evidence that accumulate shame, whether the shame of choice or grieving past selves and future selves. This book was a pleasant surprise in the study of trying to claw back to finding oneself before forgetting who we ever are when in the gaze of others.

Sarah Manguso absolutely nailed the experience of being a smart, independent, artist who gradually loses herself in the roles of wife of role and mother that she thought she would probably never have. That social conditioning pulls us so dang hard, and it is the accumulation of so many tiny decisions that justify the huge decisions, and the small forgivenesses and moments of accepting blame that isn’t really yours that allow us to find ourselves in miserable marriages with stalled careers.

I highlighted so many passages on this book, because so much resonated strongly with me - my own experience and what I’ve observed in the lives of people I know. Manguso deftly juxtaposed misery and bliss over and over again, and damn if that didn’t ring true.

I heartily recommend this book for litfic lovers and anyone who has experienced the quotidian challenges of marriage. Getting married soon, though? Don’t take this on the honeymoon.

Thank you to Hogarth and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Jane is a writer who marries, quite frankly, an awful and mediocore man. She sometimes writes her life story in a few sentences, and you can see the breakdown of the marriage in the way she writes about her life. The rage Jane feels is relatable. I think I have a pretty good marriage, and I found plenty of passages to highlight because I knew exactly how Jane felt.

This was the one that made me say, "there it is": I multitasked and made my own needs as small as possible because, I thought, I was just more capable than he was. I assumed that made me valuable.

"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 labor 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."

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House/Hogarth for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

When Jane met her future husband, John Bridges, she was ecstatic. Since she was a writer, she was attracted to him being an artist and photographer. What she didn’t realize was that the demands of being a wife and mother take its toll, and the responsibilities and career aspirations are not shared equally. Also, neither of them was emotionally equipped to effectively live with these demands.

"Liars" takes us into the complexities of Jane's fourteen-year marriage, marked by the strain of unequal burdens and thwarted ambitions. This narrative, presented through Jane's perspective, reveals the cracks in their union and her contempt for John’s behavior.

As the story progresses, Jane realizes that John's actions may be more than just the missteps of an artist and businessman struggling to find his place. She perceives a deliberate attempt to undermine her, to keep her dependent on him. She even doubts her own worth. At one point he maintained that he is a great artist, and she a “deranged lunatic”. This leads her to question her own sanity. However, she soon realizes that it was simply an attempt to control her.

She refers to John as feeling “entitled”, but initially I felt that she was also guilty of that. Though I was glued to every page, I thought that she was overly dramatic, and held unrealistic views of marriage and motherhood. However, as the story progressed, I realized that was not the case. I developed compassion for her and found her relatable. I don’t know if the author was intentional in creating that shift, but she succeeded masterfully.

"Liars" is a gripping read that will resonate with those who appreciate realism over romanticized fiction.

For fans of Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation comes a novel that shines a harsh light on the reality of being a wife and a mother under a patriarchal society. Jane, a writer, marries John, a visual artist. Slowly, Jane’s art and career become subsumed under John’s, and once they have a child things unravel further. They move back and forth between coasts every year as John changes jobs, and Jane never has the time or mental space to grow her career or work on her art as she shoulders all of the emotional labor of the family. John undermines her and gaslights her repeatedly as she struggles to find any footing.

This was an interesting, thought-provoking, rage-inducing read. Written in short paragraph after short paragraph, this reads much more like a memoir than a novel. Manguso gets at the truth of heteronormative marriages, and accurately describes all the feelings many of us experience: the rage that grows with each piece of emotional labor, but also the joy during those blissful moments when the family unit is in harmony and enjoying each other’s company. She also perfectly describes the mother-child relationship, in which intense love and happiness coexist with extreme tedium.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes Jenny Offill or Leslie Jamison’s writing, or anyone who is interested in feminism and marriage. Due to its unusual style and repetitive nature, I would not necessarily recommend it to those who prefer a plot-driven novel.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with this arc. This novel is my first by Sarah Manguso and it won't be my last. I really enjoy a book about toxic relationships, I don't know why, and this one didn't let me down. The marriage described was so realistic and toxic, I feel so many emotions for this character. The author did an amazing job at connecting readers with what the characters were going through and making them feel very authentic. I honestly felt like this was a friend telling me about her life. The writing style was immersive and had me flipping pages rapidly because I had to know what would happen. Overall, a story I will certainly recommend to my women friends!!

Liars TL;DR:
👨‍👩‍👦 Relatable Depiction of Marriage and Motherhood
🧠 Deep Psychological Insight
🤔 Powerful and Evocative Writing

Liars is a deeply unsettling exploration of a disintegrating marriage, told through the raw and honest voice of its narrator, Jane. The novel delves into themes of manipulation, denial, and the complex dynamics of a failing relationship, painting a stark picture of the emotional turmoil that accompanies such an experience.

Jane, a writer, finds herself trapped in a suffocating marriage to John, a selfish and neglectful husband who fails to appreciate her successes and talents. As the layers of their relationship are peeled back, the reader is exposed to the revolting nature of John's character and the devastating impact it has on Jane's mental and emotional well-being. This portrayal is both infuriating and addictive, capturing the madness that often accompanies the decision to stay in a toxic relationship.

Manguso's writing is characterized by its biting commentary and evocative prose. The novel's fragmented structure, with Jane occasionally summarizing her marriage in terse sentences, mirrors the chaos and confusion she feels. This stylistic choice effectively conveys the disjointed reality of living in a harmful relationship where truth is often obscured.

Manguso's ability to capture the irrationality of staying in a bad marriage and the complex interplay of dependency, fear, and societal expectations is both poignant and disturbing. The unnamed child in the story adds another layer of complexity, highlighting Jane's struggle to separate her identity from her role as a mother.

Liars will resonate deeply with readers who have experienced similar situations, offering a mirror to their own struggles and validating their feelings of frustration and helplessness. It's relentlessly negative, but such is the grim reality of marriage and motherhood at times.

While Liars may not be a pleasant read, it is undeniably a compelling one. Manguso's sharp, unflinching prose and the novel's raw emotional depth make it a book that will linger in the reader's mind long after the final page.

For those willing to confront the darker aspects of marriage, motherhood, and human relationships, Liars is a must-read. It challenges readers to think deeply about the nature of commitment, self-deception, and the price of staying in a relationship that no longer serves them.

“Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.”

When Jane meets John, she thinks she has met her future…and in a way she has. After they marry, she feels like she finally has it all. When motherhood makes her realize that as John takes up more room int heir lives, she and her ambitions are taking up less and less. If Jane could just hold it all together, things would be perfect.

Oh man. Man oh man oh man, did I hate this man. John was the absolute worst, and I hated him from the minute Jane met him. This book made me so glad to be single, though I know a lot of people that are in much happier marriages than the one portrayed in this book. I really liked the way this book was written in small chunks/stories. It was unique and kept me turning the pages until the very end. This book made me so mad for Jane, but I enjoyed every second of it.

Thank you to @hogarthbooks for my gifted copy of this book!

Marriage makes liars of us all us the premise of this relatable story of Jane and John. Told from Jane's perspective, it might be a completely different story otherwise. Not just showcasing the tangible lies but the life we live as a lie. This compared to the purity of the mother's relationship with her child, that toxicity of a suffering marriage. Artist and failed entrepreneur is the husband while the wife is mom and wife first and then writer. Raw in places, the lengthy epilogue was my favorite part. A somewhat realistic and depressing look at marriage but so well written.

Copy provided by the publisher and Netgalley

scathing and poignant, an examination of marriage as an institution that fails women and perpetuates the patriarchy. i saw too many women i know in these pages, and too many men. it’s so real and genuine there’s no doubt in my mind this isn’t mostly autobiographical. fabulous structure and prose that creates an intense and compelling read.

I think anyone who has experienced an unhappy marriage, or an emotionally abusive partner will enjoy this one. It reads like a diary with the main character's inner thoughts and experiences. The story felt very real and I would not have been surprised if it was a memoir.

we've all probably known that one friend who's relationship seems so obviously toxic that you're wondering why they're still with that person. liars feels like an attempt to key us into the mind of that friend and all the little things that make staying and complaining (often alone) easier than making the leap to leave. i personally wasn't a fan of the choppy writing style, used here to convey the monotony of everything that was happening to jane, our protagonist. however, i respect what manguso is trying to do here and there are really beautiful lines around motherhood and the children (child in this case) that are caught in between.