Liars

A Novel

De: Sarah Manguso

Narrado por: Rebecca Lowman

An “eviscerating” (The New York Times) novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all—from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments

FINALIST FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, Lit Hub, Chicago Public Library

“Is divorce the new marriage plot? . . . [Liars] pulses with a rare kind of anger, making it a compulsive, unforgettable read. Love stories, it seems, are out. Divorce as liberation? Very much in.”—Vogue

“A tour de force . . . Liars makes an old story fresh.”—NPR

“A bracing story of a woman on the verge.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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.

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.

What a downer!

I'm a feminist with a wonderful husband, a successful career, and three grown children. Although I totally buy into the idea of the disparity between men and women, when it comes to household and child care work, and my husband and I certainly thought about it over the course of our thirty year marriage, his basically felt like a treatise against marriage and motherhood. one long story of doom and gloom and victimhood

Thank You

I am grateful for this book. The overall story couldn't be more different from my life but the details and nuances of the main characters' relationship were devastatingly familiar. Finding myself and my marriage in this book helped me process some lingering emotions. It's not an easy read - in fact if you resonate with the story it's downright exhausting. But if you are a woman who has been with a narc/emotionally immature man and have gone through a breakup, you will connect with this book. Be ready to feel a gamut of emotions but mainly gratitude to be free.

Resonates

The story resonated with me as a woman who married to a liar at a young age and didn’t know people could behave like that. But I found the story repetitive and depressing.

A hard listen

Beautiful narrator. No happy ending. A rough story of a marriage. Sad. Angry. Real. Made me grateful for my own relationship. Excellent writing.

The love despite the dysfunction

This was very very relatable. And real. And triggering but also cathartic . Not just about the breakdown of a marriage that was dysfunctional from the start, but the loving and yearning for it to work in the giving and losing of oneself.