Married women often provide more care and invisible labor out of love. But it’s the expectation that they will provide it, and the cultural moralism associated with how they do it, that informs Sarah Manguso’s newest tour de force, Liars (256 pages; Hogarth). Coming out at a time when the genre of divorce books is ever-expanding (Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters, Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, and Miranda July’s All Fours), Manguso’s novel explores the subject of abuse (including self-abuse) and presents marriage as a patriarchal institution inextricable from it. As Mary Beard wrote in Women & Power, “You can’t easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.” What’s surprising is how insidious this problem remains — how often women are co-opted by the trappings of marriage, undermining our agency and drawing us into participating in our demise. In Liars, Manguso shows us up close how that’s so.
The story in Liars could be one any heteronormative woman tells her closest friends: the difficulties of being married to a man who is inattentive, allergic to housework, and believes his gifts include being destined for greatness. But it’s also a searingly visceral portrayal of the way marriage can twist a woman inside out. Told in poetic vignettes, the story’s protagonist, Jane, describes her whirlwind romance and then marriage to John; her subsequent disappointment with having sacrificed and been trapped by marriage; and her pregnancy, motherhood, and her troubling state of mind:
“There were holes in my days then, through which I dropped out of the bottom of my life and found myself inconsolable by anything in the known world. I visualized hanging myself from the lemon tree.” And: “I was a layer cake of abandonment and hurt and fury, iced with a smile.”
This might come off as histrionic, but Manguso balances details of the quotidian with an acute emotional range. Much like the protagonist in Rachel Zucker’s Soundmachine, Jane documents her days forensically and with humor: “I laundered vomit-soaked sheets until the dryer broke and then took two wet loads to the laundromat, which as usual was full of heroic women. One dabbed a bloody wound on her boyfriend’s head.” Though competent in both domestic and professional realms, Jane craves more attention for her writing. When her career begins to flourish, though, tensions flare with John.
Once the baby arrives, pressures escalate and Jane is increasingly angry yet will do almost anything to maintain the dream of “family,” which here we see as an ideology packaged and sold to women that devours us through its surreptitious reach into our most trusted spaces, our homes and our minds. Manguso casts Jane as the heroine who mistakenly loses herself: “In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone. Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.”
True. For readers who have not been through such an ordeal, Liars may prove a cautionary tale; readers who already have may find themselves frustrated with the repetitive litany of Jane’s suffering—so trained are we to dismiss women’s complaints. Through housework, childcare, career sacrifices, infidelity, and self-medication, Jane loses her sense of self, and the hardest part is witnessing her complicity. While this is not a new story, rarely has it been so well crafted and told with such precision and honesty.
H. L. Onstad’s fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Harvard Review, Solstice Magazine, and HA Journal, a publication of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.