I wrote down the story again: I was proud of our family and of John’s career, so when he played video games all night, spent weekends painting, or stayed out bodysurfing in deep water while the child and I waited, shivering, on the beach, I didn’t push back. 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.
I took three shits before breakfast and two tranquilizers before the mediation session. John said that he wasn’t to blame for the divorce but that his hand had been forced. He described me as volatile and unsafe for the child to be around.
I wrote the word LIAR on a sticky note and stuck it onto the computer screen. It covered John’s face.
Liars is the story of a tumultuous relationship — from “first ferocious hunger” to the “strange dread at suddenly being divorced” fourteen years later — as related by a woman whose successful writing career seems unthinkable in the conditions under which she worked: with a flaky and jealous artist for a husband, a need to micromanage all the details of their household, and the (not entirely unwelcome) demands of motherhood, Jane is still able to release some well-regarded work; using various grants and fellowships to pay for part-time child care so she can continue to eke out work. The storyline is not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it does jump along in fragments; highlighting all the lowlights of this relationship and making it very clear to the reader that we are getting this story only from Jane’s POV — and while she makes the case that she married a liar, someone “bad at gaslighting”, Jane tells us a few times along the way that she’s a liar, too (it’s not incidental that the title is plural.) This reads a lot like a memoir — I suppose any novel about a novelist does — so I snooped around the internet to learn about author Sarah Manguso’s life, and the major strokes line up. Whether or not the fine details are a faithful account of Manguso’s own marriage, Liars positively has the ring of truth: I absolutely believed that Jane would enter this relationship, and that even if she was lying to herself along the way, that she made the choice to stay in this relationship and work on it — to the detriment of her professional life and mental health — and the truthiness here was like a punch to the gut; you know this is the kind of chosen misery some people live in and Manguso explores it beautifully. I haven’t read the author before, but I will definitely be looking into her backlist. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
John and his co-founder had landed an investment in their little film production company, and we would move to Los Angeles to staff it and build it in a cheap warehouse space. I feared that, after we moved west, John would divide his time between Cloudberry and his art, and I would be a lonely wife with no support system, maybe saddled with a baby, unable to write or teach — a real wife, the one thing I’d sworn to myself I’d never be.
Young and beautiful, bursting with creative energy, Jane thought she had found her soulmate in John: a visual/digital/filmmaking artist (he could do anything but write), dark and handsome with a cool, green gaze; the mental and physical attraction was immediate and intense. But while all Jane required in order to work was space, John soon got big entrepreneurial ideas that would see him wanting to move back and forth across the country several times, taking frequent business trips, and spending late nights out boozing and schmoozing when he was at home. All of the moving prevented Jane from getting on a tenured teaching track, and after their baby was born, Jane was mostly concerned that John’s job had health insurance and that their moves would land the family in good school districts for their son. Throughout their relationship, Jane did all of the housework, managed all of the bills — including John’s perpetual debt — took on the vast majority of child care, and spent long, lonely stretches of time waiting for a husband who was decreasingly interested in sex with her. This isn’t only the story of how challenging it is for a mother to be an artist (although it explores that, too), but the fact that John was jealous of Jane’s artistic success did contribute to their collapse; a singular tragedy, universally relatable .
Quotable bits:
• Elegies are the best love stories because they’re the whole story.
• A wedding vow is a mind game. You have to guess whether the person currently on his best behavior will someday value your physical, emotional, and financial health above the convenience of being able to just break the contract.
• My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.
• I had infinite patience with my one-year-old, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a two-year-old, and almost no patience with my husband, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a mother.
• On the one day John had to take the child to school, he forgot to pack a lunch. I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.
In my sleuthing, I found a couple of interesting interviews with Manguso online. On The Creative Independent website she says:
As a young person, I did not have any responsibilities beyond myself. I wasn’t part of a family. I wasn’t a mother. I didn’t even have a cat. It was very easy for me to identify with this kind of masculine ideal of the writer only ever writing. Then, of course, time passed and I made culturally inflected decisions that worked against myself as a writer. I married a man. I’ve since divorced that man. I had a child. I still have the child.
And in a conversation with fellow author/mother Kate Zambreno in The Paris Review, Manguso says:
After giving birth, if I wasn’t teaching or working on a contracted magazine piece, I worked on the infinite mountain of household tasks until I fell, already basically asleep, into bed. The sort of work necessary to make a book, the sort of work that looks like nothing, that doesn’t accumulate daily, that might require that you write two hundred pages only to throw them away…I was imprisoned in a system of capital within which that kind of work held no value, and, chillingly, it very quickly stopped holding value to me. The books I’ve written since my son was born have been written one pebble at a time, not at all like the books that I once wrote while suspended in a prolonged dream state. It’s worth adding that I was privileged as hell during this entire exercise, and it still, as you say, devastated me.
*Both articles are worth reading in their entirety; Manguso is thoughtful and fluent throughout.
Our relationship had been a fourteen-year conversation about the intersection of mental health and art, but really it was two arguments that never touched: John’s twin insistences that he was a great artist and that I was a deranged lunatic.
And back to the title: Despite the undeniably hard domestic conditions of Jane’s life, she does leave open the possibility that John’s not entirely wrong to call her “crazy” sometimes: there are frequent crying jags and screaming matches, (idle?) threats of self-harm, daily tranquillisers, and an obsessiveness to her cleaning and organising; along with his own failed artistic dreams, in the face of Jane’s successes, it must have been a hard relationship for John, too. Making the title of Liars plural seems an act of grace; an admission of shared responsibility, and the novel is stronger for it. I loved everything about this.
