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 […]
Marital Dis: ‘Liars’ by Sarah Manguso
by H. L. Onstad
