Liars
An addictive and unflinching story about marriage and betrayal
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- € 5,99
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A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all.
'An unflinchingly true and honest depiction of a marriage turning from gold to dust' – Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
'A white-hot dissection of the power imbalances in a marriage, and as gripping as you want fiction to be. Any spouse that has ever argued about money, time, work and childcare should read it' – Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity
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 joys and labors 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.
Sarah Manguso's Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.
'Painful and brilliant – I loved it' – Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The second novel from essayist and poet Manguso (after Very Cold People) paints an excoriating portrait of a marriage. In brisk prose, Manguso tells the story of John and Jane, who meet as emerging artists and discover, over the course of their 14-year union, just how "adversarial" a marriage can become. Jane, who narrates, is a writer deeply committed to her craft. While working on a book-length poem, she meets John, a multidisciplinary artist, and she's relieved to find a kindred spirit, someone "for whom making art was central and being in a relationship was incidental." But after getting married and becoming parents, Jane realizes John is "the main character" and she's "his wife." Consequently, she "floated face down in housewifery," cooking, cleaning, and taking charge of moving the family from New York City to Los Angeles after John launches a film production company there, then back to New York after the company fires him. When John eventually leaves her, she fantasizes "about shitting in my hand and smearing... the shit into the backs of all his paintings." Manguso's barbed sentences push the plot forward at a brisk pace. The author is at the top of her game.
