Review: Liars by Sarah Manguso
The crisis of motherhood portrayed in the novel begs the question of how tradition and modernity have worked in tandem to keep women in their place
When The New York Times asked three mothers to keep a log of their daily activities back in 2021 to document their lives in the pandemic as part of The Primal Scream series, I never thought I would read one of them. Well, not an actual log of one of the participants, but rather a similar but fictional log of the unseen labour that women perform on a daily basis. Liars by Sarah Manguso stops being fictive at one point; the frustration she is able to communicate is so deeply tethered to the realist account of daily lives of wives that it strongly feels like autofiction. Nothing much happens throughout the novel: Jane meets John, they fall in love, and everything goes downhill from there.
No matter where you’re in the world, heteronormative roles replicate themselves endlessly. John is your typical entitled white man and Jane is a brilliant writer and resourceful woman. When she wins a prize they both applied for, he cannot hide his jealousy and works overtime to sabotage her. Still, she marries him and the reader cannot fathom why. In Jane’s own words, we have the answer, “I’d loved the idea of a long marriage, like a family heirloom, ugly but important.” So, she plays her part because we have no anthesis to the heterosexual romance myth that doesn’t leave women relegated to the domestic sphere.
The problem with the novel occurs when Manguso refuses to go beyond the archetypal dynamics of a wife and husband stuck in the eternal dance of consuming one another. John is easily identifiable as the villain. He is abusive, manipulative, and undependable. He does not have a single redeeming quality. By the end, he is just a shell, a caricature of a bad husband. Any intelligent reader can tell the story is being narrated from Jane’s point of view and naturally, her gaze magnifies every single one of his misgivings. In the aftermath of the marriage, there are sides to pick, villains to cast.
John is not the only liar. Jane’s narration doesn’t allow any chance for his character to develop. Indeed, he never feels like a character at all and seems, from the beginning, like a congealed mass of self importance, that expands by consuming everything around him. The relationship never develops beyond a pattern of gaslighting and manipulation and this is where Manguso’s novel falters. So, the stakes are low right from the start. No one is shocked when he eventually cheats on her, and the story comes out as one long agonizing cry of a woman losing herself in a marriage. The novel is filled with aphorisms like “a wife is an animal”, which are nails in the coffin of the illusory happy ever-afters.
To make matters infinitely worse, Jane falls pregnant. The transition into motherhood is brutal and shocking for her. All the sentimentality attached to motherhood is inverted. Isolated by the sheer volume of tasks she has to perform every day, she feels lost. Motherhood leaves her stranded on an island with no access to her former intellectual self. Caught between wanting to be a writer and answering the responsibilities of motherhood, she spends her days in a daze of shame and guilt. Always hypersensitive to the needs of the child, she simply doesn’t have enough time to form a coherent thought.
All of this is compounded by John, who moves his family across state lines multiple times on the whims of his unstable career. Jane is left with no choice but to follow him with the child. She stops writing and is unable to take permanent teaching jobs because John refuses to help with childcare or housekeeping. Financially dependent on her husband, her escape routes are blocked.
Much of women’s writing features either the abusive partner trope or the absent husband trope. The regurgitation of the same story has made it almost a cliché. Perhaps Manguso is also aware of the long line of women writers she is following in the quest to name the eternal woman’s condition. So she doesn’t fight it. She submits and sets about painstakingly documenting every single task Jane performs in a day, while John is out doing what men do, leaving Jane “rotting with rage”.
When Rachel Cusk wrote A Life’s Work more than two decades earlier, she invited a furious backlash for her description of motherhood and childbirth. The critics would not have it; she was a child hater, a bad mother sullying the most natural and pure moment of a woman’s life. Subverting the romantic notions of motherhood in 2024 is not so scandalous anymore, or so I thought. When I noticed that Jane never names the baby throughout the novel, she refers to him as “the child”, I too instinctively fell into the trap of judging her tone for signs of emotional distance from her baby. Does she hate the child, like Cusk was accused of doing years ago? Turns out even the most intentional readers cannot shift their gaze, the idea of the nurturing and sacrificing mother cannot be shaken off.
Manguso’s subject matter has been widely discussed, but perhaps not enough. The repetitive acts of cleaning and feeding a child seem like a nightmare, where the mother is just a machine. These descriptions of daily acts of caregiving repeat like a drum beat throughout the novel, which makes it plain exhausting at times. But what if that is all there is to the drudgery of repeating a set number of tasks every day? You clean the house, it is dirty again. You feed the child, and he is hungry again. What else can you do with the postpartum plot? It doesn’t promise a narrative layered with complex plot lines or cliffhangers. But then, neither does motherhood.
Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House are a strong contrast to Manguso’s novel in this regard. They both deal with the violence of motherhood but add a layer of paranoia and psychosis to produce tension and urgency in the narrative. Jane’s frustration is elemental. The threat of nervous breakdown is always looming but she doesn’t actually ever lose her marbles. She doesn’t think she is a dog like the protagonist of Nightbitch, nor does she think that she is being haunted by the ghost of a children’s book author like the protagonist of The Upstairs House. This story is plain and simple, like the story of every mother and wife, always on the brink of insanity.
The load of childrearing has always been shouldered disproportionately by women, their unseen labour deemed instinctual. If the crisis of motherhood portrayed in Liars seems like a rite of passage, it begs the question of how tradition and modernity have worked in tandem to keep women in their place. It has turned the plight of mothers into one long inescapable moment, and all we can do is let out a long collective exasperated sigh. The lore continues. As Jane narrates at the start of the novel: “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.”
Rutba Iqbal is a writer based in Delhi. She writes on books, art, culture, and movies.