Husbands and Wives: On Sarah Manguso's Liars

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• Husbands and Wives:On Sarah Manguso's Liars
• Hannah Bonner (bio)

Liars by Sarah Manguso ( Hogarth 2024)

Here is a story as common as vanity or violence:

In the beginning, I fell in love with a man. He was an English professor and read dog-eared paperbacks of Nietzsche. He was married, wore a beanie, and sported many indecipherable tattoos. When he smoked, he smoked gluttonously. He shared similar insatiable appetites for food, drink, and sex. I thought he was the smartest person I had ever met and told him so. We fell in love as married men and younger women tend to do: with the voracity of lions.

What followed were the usual torments: broken promises, disappointments, separations and reunions that ping-ponged between carnal desperation and despair. In response, I drank too much and worked with a kind of Spartan ferocity. I reasoned that if I could catch up—in age, in stature, in success—that, surely, he would settle for our life over his other one. But as I increasingly published and [End Page 482] won fellowships, his career foundered. Sometimes, he praised me. Other times, he withheld any emotional or physical affection for months. Once he went a whole four weeks without saying the words I love you. Toward the very end, after the end, his apathy was so total it was almost erotic.

He was an alcoholic, quick to anger and prone to depression. His living spaces were adolescent—his sink glutted with dirty dishes, his bong bowls clogged with resin. He owned copious amounts of the best books, but also Rick and Morty DVDs, Deftones posters, a plastic Leatherface mask, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figurines. In the corner of his Chapel Hill apartment, there stood an easel he never used and an assortment of expensive, unopened paints. Initially, I marveled at the story behind the purchase of each object. Later, all I could see was how much there was to dust.

Sometimes he was so tender that I enfolded myself in his arms, which were muscular and covered with black hair. My grizzly bear! My guy! Sometimes he screamed at me for what seemed like hours, berating me about an offhand comment to a stranger in public or a perceived slight; he punched holes in walls. Once he locked me out of my house in the middle of winter; panicked, I pounded on the door until he acquiesced, both of us ringing with rage. When friends spoke of fights with their spouses I nodded knowingly; I understand now that anyone can fight bitterly like married people do, that their fights and our fights were of the same fellowship, tone, and degree. I spent most of my twenties and half my thirties ensnared in the agonizingly obvious: I should've left him much sooner than I did. Why I didn't is a question that haunts me until this day. So, too, does my reason for ever entering such an arrangement in the first place. While I wasn't good at courting happiness, writing was the one vocation in which I could recover some semblance of control.

Jane, the protagonist in Sarah Manguso's ninth book, Liars, is a perfect wife—and also a writer. While Manguso's stark prose is [End Page 483] wholly averse to cliché, Liars is a book about the tropes of husbands and wives, in this case physically manifested in the union of Jane and her dawdling husband John. "In the beginning, I was only myself," Jane says in the early pages of the novel:

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. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.

The first line of Liars assumes the language of origin stories, of Genesis. John and Jane become a twenty-first-century Adam and Eve whose story has "been told ten billion times" but here, with Manguso's clarity and candor, the tragedy is not lyrically adorned but brutally rendered and plain. "John had taught me a lesson that felt indelible: that there...