Liars

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 — the resentments and disappointments that can rot the heart' – Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace'Painful and brilliant—I loved it' – Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/OrA 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, A triumph and a revelation . . . the most honest marriage novel I have ever read. Sarah Manguso’s writing is furious, elegant, bitter, tender, frightening, and deeply funny. I loved this book, I read Liars in one breathless, refuse-to-be-interrupted sitting. I was walloped on every page—by the painful familiarity of the story, by the all-at-onceness of the life described in these pages, by the brilliance of Manguso’s storytelling . . . I’m going to be returning to—and learning from—this book for years, I was spellbound, entranced by Sarah Manguso’s deceptively simple but fathoms-deep storytelling. There’s an incredible force that underlies this work, propulsive and wild and a little bit scary, An exquisitely creepy book about one of our most horrifying institutions: marriage. I quickly devoured it and loved it

Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including the novel Very Cold People, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her genre-defying work of aphoristic non-fiction, 300 Arguments, was named a best book of the year by more than twenty publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize. Her work is regularly featured across The New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine and The New Yorker, among others. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.

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