"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."

In the distinct minority of readers I found this book boring, repetitive and slogged through it. Liked neither Jane nor John, Why their child remained "the child" [never named, the only character in the book; some literary device I'm sure, but...}

I found Jane in self-denial through her years of misery--a self-inflicted pain, also inflicted on the reader! She lies to herself and to John; she is full of self-doubt. John lies to her, yadda yadda and ad infinitum, endless repetition. Hatelful.

And the cancer--did it come out of nowhere? Did i miss it [because I didn't care enough to spot its mention before the diagnosis was revealed in the story]?

Highly disappointed.

This took me longer to finish than I anticipated because of the physical stress I experienced reading about being reduced to a wife of a man who is HORRIBLE at gaslighting. Real horror comes from the monotony of the nuclear family. I thank Sarah Manguso and NetGalley for making me go about this reading experience with a clenched jaw and white knuckles.

Jane meets John and they live happily ever after... but definitely not realistically or financially, or emotionally or mentally, so basically not at all. I am so thankful to Hogarth Books, PRHAudio, Netgalley, and Sarah Manguso for granting me advanced digital and audio access to this heartbreaking saga before it hits shelves on July 23, 2024.

Jane is an esteemed writer who has published several books in her lifetime, and one day, she becomes John's wife, even though she swore to herself that she'd never reduce herself to that measly title. It's not long before she's slaving around in this new role, doing household chores, caring for her husband, and being expected to bear a child, all while her husband gives about 2% of the effort, care, and love to his spouse.

Honestly, I saw a lot of myself in Jane, for if I were to have ever married my toxic, mentally abusive ex-boyfriend, our scenario would have definitely mirrored John and Jane's. (Thankfully, I am happily married to my best friend...)

Liars is a horror story of a different breed. It's heartbreaking and realistic to many degrees, and I think every woman should read and experience this book for its true nature. Jane is a never-ending punching bag for her husband and societal standards, and as the reader, I yearned for her reprieve and happiness, yet there was no such happy ending.

Fast and furious. I consumed this in one sitting and felt swept along by all the challenges the protagonist faced. Such a real and cutting portrayal of one marriage and of motherhood.

A dark emotional raw look at a marriage a marriage that is so dark so difficult to even read about.Jane and John sadly should never of married.John is a self absorbed child,Jane an author a talented award winner is totally forced to give up her world her career.Watching this marriage unravel year by year was
depressing but due to the authors incredible writing I was unable to stop reading.#netgalley #randomhouse

Liars is the story of a marriage told in small bursts, like windows into the toxicity. We follow Jane, a writer, and John, an artist/“jack of all trades type”, as they meet, fall in love, get married, have a child, and coexist through a tumultuous relationship.

The entire book is short paragraphs of moments in their relationship, which was strange at first, but comes together quickly. We watch as John promises the world to Jane but rarely follows through. How his narcissism causes him to -systemically, it seems- get in the way of her career and opportunities when he feels she’s progressing past him. He slowly breaks her down with many cross-country moves and an overall lack of his presence on the day-to-day, as he tries and fails with several business ventures.

As Jane grows to see she can no longer rely on John, as their marriage slowly crumbles, the unconditional love of and from their child is the light keeping her alive.

Despite my initial confusion at the layout, this quickly became addictive. Watching Jane slowly peel back layers and layers of a narcissistic, manipulative shell until she got to the black center, realizing she’d been trapped. I love books like this that get down into the inner workings of a relationship; Jane’s slow descent into resentment and loathing as she came to understand the man she married, often interceded by those subtle moments of normalcy that can make one second guess themselves. A raw, unflinching look into mental health, motherhood, and toxic relationships.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for early access to this ebook, available July 23, 2024.

*I received an advanced review copy for free, and am leaving this review voluntarily*

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

3.75 out of 5 stars

I tried to read this book when I was first approved for it. I did not like it. However, my NetGalley percentage is suffering, so I tried again. Crikey, I tore through it.

The story follows Jane, a writer, and her boyfriend-fiancé-husband, John, an artist. She sells books, he uses money for artistic endeavors and business trips. After they get married, all the red flags that were there before exacerbate into land mines.

John and Jane move coast to coast multiple times over the course of ten years, always at the behest of John due to cheaper art materials or because of his latest business venture. Then he tells Jane that he is holding up the family because she doesn't have a steady job, despite having had one before they moved the first time, then having secured one shortly before he said they were moving the second time.

She has also sold a few more books over the years. She gets pregnant and has a boy that she only refers to as "the child."

Despite not liking the beginning, and the writing being choppy, almost like reading diary entries, I was hooked after the first 10% or so of the book. I felt some of her pains in my heart like a harpy's claw had pierced my chest and was pulling the organ out.

It was a profound glimpse into a very toxic marriage, but even women in marriages as close to perfect as one can get will understand some of the things that Jane goes through. Her love for her child is a loud and bright love that sometimes scares her, sometimes saves her, always surprises her.

Sometimes she hates John and knows that he is gaslighting her and finding powerful ways of manipulating her and making her feel less than and convincing her that she is not good enough but that due to his magnanimity, he abides her out of selfless love.

God. I despised him with such ferocity my ears would ring sometimes while reading the book.

Worth the read because of my violent reaction to it.

Intensely amazing!! Jane, a writer, meets John, the aspiring artist, and the two quickly marry. Unexpectedly, after a decade of marriage, John wants a divorce.
The emotions you will experience with Jane throughout the novel are breathtaking. I felt every moment she experienced happiness, vulnerability, anger, and rage. Recommend!

Raw and well written story about the tyrany of an abusive relationship and the victim's reluctance to escape. Staying for the child, wanting to have a successful marriage, financial dependence, emotional vulnerability and depression, etc., etc.
Poignantly told with honesty.

It took a bit to get into this book. It felt disjointed to read. I felt like I was reading bits and pieces of someone’s journal. I was able to finish the book, but it took a while for it to start making sense to me.

There was no scene development and the characters it took so long to get a glimpse of who they were, that it wasn’t really even a picture that I could form in my minds eye. So I can’t really recall much of what I read honestly.

This book was dark and depressing. If you like reading about mediocre and abusive men, then this book is for you. I couldn't stand John, but I think that's the point the author was trying to make. I've never read from this author before, but I liked her prose. She definitely makes you feel something. My main problem was the time lapse. It's hard to tell how much time has passed in John and Jane's dysfunctional marriage. This is a good book, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. It made me never want to get married. I absolutely love the cover art. It's so striking and intense.

Liars by Sarah Manguso is about Jane a writer who meets a man named John Bridges, a filmaker and artist himself. They marry, move in together, and eventually start a family. Liars looks at motherhood, marriage, relationships, careers, responsibility, and ultimate identity. The plot was well crafted, and Manguso does wonders with language and showing the vulnerability of the characters, especially Jane. I loved the rawness of the book. I felt I was reading the writing of a established writer who has a distinctive voice. Manguso made me really hate John. I wanted to go through the page sometimes with anger. Well written, funny, heartbreaking book about love, marriage and identity. Four stars.

Intense, visceral, intimate, infuriating. The author's choice of using generic names John and Jane for the main characters feels like it says something.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy in exchange for an unbiased review.

Sometimes the book made me feel like it was trying to slowly suffocate me. Other times it felt like it was coming for my throat with a knife. In its less confrontational spaces it just made me hyperventilate. Maybe it's a mark of its goodness that I wanted better things to happen to its characters.

I really did not enjoy this book, and I DNF. The subject matter was just too depressing and not my cup of tea. I know there is a big market for this genre, but I am not in that group.

This is a novel that probably portraits many marriages. It is unfortunate, but true. This is a sad account of how lies lead to an unraveling of a relationship. Not fun reading, but informative.

This book was about two liars. A cheating, insecure, emotionally abusive husband, and a wife who lies to herself that his abuse is acceptable and that her role as a wife/mother is more important that her own identity and agency. It reads as a window into this woman’s experience throughout a 14 year relationship and allows the reader to walk through the lifespan of an abusive relationship. Lovebombing to gaslighting to diminishing to the final discard. If someone has not lived this life experience, I can see where this book may be frustrating. Why didn’t she just leave? How could she not see she didn’t deserve this? How could she let her talent and personal career aspirations fall second to her husband, who was a failure in many ways? Although heavily triggering at times, my heart broke over and over again for her, her agency, and her child. This book is more than just an abusive relationship though. It speaks to the sacrifices and concessions modern day women are often making without any acknowledgment of such. Dying silent mental deaths over and over again. Physically deteriorating but ignoring their bodies cries for help because they know they are not afforded any graces. The right audience is going to eat this book up and ask for seconds.

I would like to thank net galley and Hogarth Publishing for a DRC of this book in exchange for a review.

Liars by Sarah Manguso is the start and end of Jane and John’s marriage that bore the slings and arrows of lust, infatuation, jealousy, child rearing, sickness, and betrayal over the course of fourteen years, including the pandemic. It reads like a confessional essay threaded with beautiful turns of phrase and it is very easy to take sides. Manguso writes the titular “liars” in such a convincing, familiar way that everyone can acknowledge that married life, especially with children, involves a certain degree of lying in order to get from one day to the next with the trappings of success intact. Lying can be a full time job and can also be an act of love—until it isn’t! This book is for anyone who was climbing the walls and barking for The Tortured Poets Department and then wished that there was a more thorough accounting of what wrongs were done in both directions—the ledger as written by Manguso misses no transaction. If you fell into the confessional divorce essay hole from earlier this year, this book will feel familiar like sitting opposite a friend you haven’t seen for a while but boy, does she have something to tell you.

Thank you to Random House/Hogarth for an advanced e-ARC of this title!

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review. First, change the title. Do you know how many books are out there with the word “liar” in the title? Additionally, John is a liar, but he has behaviors that are so much more devastating and horrifying. And while I am not a marriage counselor when the person who has asked you to marry them asks you not to mention it to his “ex-girlfriend” because he hasn’t quite broken up with her yet doesn’t that give you pause? And why are you even in the same place as that person? Yet Jane marries John.

John gaslights Jane over and over, drags her back and forth across the country for a career that never comes to anything, leaves it to her to raise the child she is sure she never wanted and he can’t be bothered with. Jane could have had a successful career. She had to give up the work she found every time John found his next calling. He borrowed millions of dollars for projects that collapsed. She is angry, he is angry. Why doesn’t she leave? It’s never that simple. This isn’t just a marriage that isn’t working. This is raw and palpable emotion with two very broken people. Is it based on the author’s life or someone close to her?

Change the title.

This is a first narrative take on the slow dissolution of Jane's identity within her marriage. Jane is a writer, independent, winning awards, and vowing to never be just a housewife just like her mother. And then she marries John.

It starts out with little things-she loans him 8,000 he can't pay back. He says he can't afford an engagement ring then gets 6 shirts custom made. Slowly she begins to only exist to satisfy his needs. When she compares herself to other women, they all complain about the same things so she begins to think this is normal. Halfway through the book, I thought 'why doesn't she just leave him???'. But then she has a baby and is now trapped.

"My husband threw the fact that I didn't have a full time job in my face. The work of caring for the baby was invisible to him". "All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do, after all our education, after having been told we'd be able to do anything, after having children in America".

Her circumstances become a bit depressing since she continually rationalizes why she can't leave or change her life, and go back to her writing career, which has languished. To compound her situation, John takes and loses multiple jobs and moves them from LA to NY and back for his next great venture. She has some childcare but not enough to give her the time to write and pursue her career.

But my real problem with the book is the narrative style which is just a description of her daily activities and tasks. 'Today I took the child to the park', etc.. You never get to know the child's name or her husband's side of the story. There's a point in the book where she has some health issues due to an autoimmune disorder, and John has to help with the baby, but then they go back to her regular routine. So the reading becomes a bit tedious with this style, and you can imagine the outcome without needing much imagination.