Layers of Deception in Sarah Manguso's "Liars"

By Brock Kingsley on July 24, 2024

I was, and maybe still am, unsure of how to read Liars, the new novel from Sarah Manguso. I wonder if the prevailing attitude of viewers/readers is to assume that all art is "true" or is in some way making a meta-commentary on the artist's life and the artist's art—all art is art qua art all the time. Or am I the one assuming this is the prevailing attitude? Is the rise of auto fiction still rising? Maybe it's not "truth" we're looking for so much as it is a piece of the person: we are voyeurs longing to look in at someone else's misfortune expressed through art and wanting that to mirror their lived experiences.

One reason I kept/keep wondering about how to read Liars is that I am more familiar with Manguso's nonfiction, her lyric memoirs (are these classifications also imprecise, maybe even lies? Yes.). Years ago I fell in love with Manguso's voice and style. Brusque and brisk chunks of thoughts that trail off into white space—a little bit of elision, a little bit of ellipsis. Her books are slim volumes that I took extra time to read because I would keep circling back to roll sections around my head thinking of the ideas, structure, the music in the sentences. Lyrical without being flowery. Emotional without falling into sentimentality.

Still, my first instinct (and responsibility) is to believe the artist: if she says it's a novel, it's a novel; if she says it's a long poem, then it's a long poem. These categories, as much as they will always be lies, tell us something about how to read the work—just like a title. They also demand something different from the writer. What readers expect from a memoir is different from what they expect from a novel, auto fiction or not. In the same way it's my—our—responsibility to believe women. I bring this up because I can imagine responses to this book from certain crowds—oh she's exaggerating the gaslighting, she's putting all the blame on the man, she's lying.

In Liars, she might answer that "yes, she is lying." But as a riposte, she might add that in relationships, we're all liars. We lie to our partners, and more to the point, we lie to ourselves. We lie because we don't want to believe what we've become, what we've gone so long without saying.

Jane, an accomplished writer, meets and falls for John, a multi-disciplinary artist. They date. Jane wins a prestigious fellowship they both applied for. John sulks, starts to show narcissistic tendencies. As the years progress, Jane describes the claustrophobic nature of the relationship: marriage, a child, John's becoming the worst type of art monster. Her work is dismissed, his takes priority even though he puts little effort into it and it goes nowhere. He is often short on cash, moving the family for his work again and again, absent from home life. When Jane finds herself defending John, or trying to rationalize his decisions, she thinks, "That's just me projecting a pretty moral onto a story of deliberate harm."

The tone in Liars belies the resentment a self-assured feminist feels after being duped into a gendered role in a sexist relationship. You can hear the unspoken how did I let this happen:

"I thought about all the wives who had lived before birth control, before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape and domestic abuse, before women could buy a house or open a bank account or vote or drive or leave the house. I wanted to apologize to all the forgotten and unseen women who had allowed me to exist, all the women I'd sworn not to emulate because I'd wanted to be human—I wanted to be like a man, capable and beloved for my service to the world."

If Jane wants to be like a man, it's because we forgive men too much, we let their monstrosities slide if we decide they are in the service of art, commerce, politics, or entertainment. We treat men as more human, giving them more rights, more freedom (of movement, of body, of money)—none of which they've earned or deserve more than any other human. It's a misconception that "muscular" or "strong" (in writing and elsewhere) are default male qualities. Manguso is direct, witty, one of the smartest writers I've read.

If we look for kernels of truth in fictive works of art it's because we want to relate, we want to see ourselves—we want to know someone else's train wreck is just like ours. A novel like Liars makes me wonder how much I lie in an average day. Furthermore, what constitutes a lie? Are lies only lies if they are told to others—does it count double when I lie to myself? Most lies I tell are to myself. In Manguso's work, it's not hard to find ourselves, to recognize the similarities between Jane's lies and our own. Liars lets us reconsider, like Jane, just how much we've kept (and been kept) silent until we've been able to find a way out and reclaim our voices.