Don't Tell Me I Have To Care About The Husband

My gripe with that LIARS review

I read Sarah Manguso’s Liars in a haze of urgency, finishing the book in a day. After polling friends who’ve also read the book, it turns out that this is not an uncommon experience. I couldn’t stop, they tell me. I had to finish it. I KNOW, I say.

The book is about marriage, but it’s mostly about the deadly minutiae of domestic labor, childcare, and storytelling as a way to stay. As a way to validate one’s choices. Liars is about a woman who lies to herself in order to make sense of her life.

Here’s a brutal excerpt:

Hannah and her second husband had had a baby two years earlier. She said that her husband had also failed to recognize the invisible work of nursing and caring for their child, and that they’d had the same arguments about whose life was harder and why Hannah wasn’t getting any work done.

To solve the problem, she said, I became a lot more patient.

!!!!!!!!!

I’ve shoved this book into people’s hands in an evangelical fury, and have been eagerly reading any and all coverage. Last week, Parul Sehgal wrote a review of Liars for the New Yorker and I have thoughts! Mainly that her central issue with the novel is the best part. The part that makes the book impossible to ignore, the part that makes everyone who loves it want to talk about it immediately with anyone who will listen.