Zibby chats with award-winning author Sarah Manguso about LIARS, an eviscerating and unforgettable story of a marriage that burns to the ground and a woman who rises inexorably from its ashes. Sarah delves into her novel’s portrayal of a marriage that devolves into covert domestic abuse, exposing the often-overlooked dynamics of control and manipulation. She also reflects on her journey to becoming a writer and then describes a very tumultuous time in her life, which is when she wrote this powerful novel.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Sarah. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss your book Liars, which, by the way, I had to keep looking like a hundred times to make sure this was a novel.

I was like, it is a novel, right? Autobiographical? I don't know. 

Sarah: Okay. I guess we're starting. Thanks for having me. 

Zibby: Okay. Here. I'll back up. Okay. Sarah. What is Liars about? 

Sarah: Liars is a novel about just how easily a marriage between progressive seeming people equals can devolve into a traditional marriage between a husband and a domestic abuse victim.

Zibby: Yes. So my joking question. It just felt to me so. real and there was so much detail over so much time. It is a feat, whether it's fiction or not, just even to have this many examples and all those specific moments that you're like, oh, that's a good example. It's like they're quiet moments, but they're so important when they all build together.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. I'm so glad to talk about this aspect of the book because I knew I needed to tell the story of this marriage to show what covert abuse really looks like in painstaking detail for two reasons. For the first reason is that all my life I've heard marriage takes work and all over the world abuse victims are thinking, oh, I guess this is the work that everyone's talking about, but we never really, or at least I had never really heard in detail what ought to constitute that work and what doesn't fall into that category of.

Of, uh, realistic work that a marriage partner ought to do. And when we don't talk about that, like on a granular level, we enable abuse, domestic abuse. And so that was why it was so important for me to pack the book with details because it's the critical mass of details that makes It's John, the husband's abuse, impossible to deny.

And you know, the question of like, you know, is it real, like, did you get these from life? I mean, I will say that the number of women married to men who have read this book and said that the novel describes their marriage to a T is disturbing. 

Zibby: Yeah, I can imagine that. Well, It's really powerful and you, uh, I, I literally felt like I was reading a diary and yeah, like I was in it.

I was really in someone's life in a way that not most, you know, it, it, it was, it's almost like, and people are like, oh, it's a, it's a character based novel. This is like the character was the marriage and it's like the marriage was the point of like,.. 

Sarah: I like that. I like that qualification. I've, I've heard a couple of really amazing readings of the book besides that one.

The, Feminist writer Liz Lenz, whom I love, said that it's a whodunit and the, you know, the instigator is patriarchy, like patriarchy did it. She said it more elegantly than, than I just did. But yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's just the, you know, my refusal to sort of elide the events of the marriage into the way that marriage is often talked about.

You know, it's private. It's be, it's behind closed doors. It's between two people. You know, both, both of them are, you know, both of them are responsible for what happens in the marriage. No. A heteronormative marriage is between, as I said, a husband and an abuse victim. 

Zibby: I mean, not always , but in this marriage. 

Sarah: Heteronormative.

Yeah. I mean, I would say like a, you know, traditional heteronormative, you know, a marriage like most heterosexual marriages, I think is but, you know, of course, not all marriages. 

Zibby: Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think that's the other thing, right? Each marriage is so specific. Each relationship is so specific and contains multitudes, right?

All these stories. All this background. And when you're trying to compare, and I think, you know, even in the book when it's like, oh, well, that person is, you know, compared to them, we're, we're okay. You know, like think about how bad that is. Oh, 

Sarah: yes. Yes. Exactly. Like, Oh yeah. What Jane just went through. Oh yeah.

I would never go through that. My marriage is fine. Oh wait these next three things actually are happening in my marriage is, you know, am I, am I Jane? Am I not Jane? Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like, it's counterintuitive because I mean, if you, if you put too many details and too many examples into a book, it's, it's like, it becomes turgid and hard to get through and boring, but yeah, no, I mean, it's, again, it just like, it seemed really important to just say like, look, um, you know, it's a, it's a paradigm of a husband.

I've heard this from a couple of readers now, like a husband throws something away in the trash, but just sort of like balances it on the top of the trash without pushing it down. And that specific example really struck a nerve with, with several readers have reached out to me and said like, you know, I never thought about that in the sort of cornucopia of detail that my marriage is offering me, but like that.

I, I never realized that is infuriating. 

Zibby: Yeah. Well, I literally, I don't know if you can see, I literally dog eared like every other patient for a different quote. So I'm just going to pick one of these, uh, if that's okay. How about this? Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women.

It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn't that we'd been born angry. We'd become women. And ended up angry. Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. Infants are angry. Have you ever sat all night holding a baby in the dark, who's screaming right into your face?

It changes you, or so my husband used to say. He'd done that one night, sat and been screamed at. I was sitting right next to him, but he always told the story as if he'd been the only one there. All the other days and nights, it had just been me, but that one night had been the real game changer, apparently.

My mother told me I'd been such a happy child. You loved everything, she said. I became early, though. I was precocious. I pitied men for having to stay the same all their lives, for missing out on this consuming rage. 

Sarah: Mm hmm. Thank you so much for reading that. Yeah, that's an important passage for me. It's one of the few moments that Jane isn't dealing with a flurry of assorted emergencies, like a moment where she actually has a minute to think.

And whenever she has a minute to think, she feel, you know, she, she's like, Oh my God, I have four seconds to digest what just happened. I'm going to have an insight because I don't typically have time to have insights in my, in my daily life. Yeah. The idea of, of an angry woman as an unreasonable woman or, um, an angry woman as a crazy woman or as an unstable woman.

These are words that abusers deploy to distract people from what they did to their victims to make them that way. any again and again, you see, uh, you know, the crazy woman and the calm man, that's a domestic abuse paradigm that is still so easily overlooked. I mean, I, it's not about any one example in particular, but like to pick one ripped from the news headlines of recent years, Gabby Petito, who was murdered by her husband.

She and he both had police records and before he murdered her, a police officer evaluated what was going on with them. They were fighting, they were fighting in their van and, you know, Gabby got the warning that time because, you know, she was just so unstable and she, you know, confessed to having, like, reached out and, and scratched or hit the husband who would murder her.

And, you know, the police officer read it the way that people read it. You know, you look at the, you look at the person who's freaking out. I mean, she's obviously the problem. I would love for people to look at that paradigm and, you know, Instead, see, oh, that's obviously somebody who's been abused, not like, that's somebody that just went crazy out of nowhere.

Um, you know, it's a very entrenched narrative that women go crazy out of nowhere. 

Zibby: And that so many men say that like all their exes were nuts. 

Sarah: Yes. Right. That's so common. And that they had to leave them because they went crazy. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Another sort of facet. Of that sort of relation is something that I was thinking about as I was writing the last part of the book, the sort of the final third or the final act of the book, after John leaves Jane.

Oh no, that's a terrible spoiler, but I don't know. 

Some people say like, 

Zibby: I know exactly what was okay. Let's just say the final third of the book. Don't even say that. 

Sarah: Okay. Okay. Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay. We'll, we'll do that part. Yeah. The final third, the third act. Yep. 

Sarah: So in the third act of the book, the final third of the book, Jane starts having trouble recounting to herself what has just happened.

And it was crucial for me to represent the way that trauma abuse as a kind of trauma impedes. A person's ability to remember things. Amber Heard was vilified for forgetting details about her relationship with Johnny Depp. And people said, Oh, well, she's obviously lying because a liar has stories that are inconsistent.

That can be true. But what is also. Very true. And, you know, very scarily under understood or very scarily not widely understood, I guess, is that a traumatized person can't remember memories form in safety. Memories form in emotional safety. I know that from experience, and it is terrifying to have a traumatized mind Unable to remember things linearly, or completely, or consistently, you can remember and forget, as Jane does, until the trauma has passed.

But, until that happens, The, you know, unstable, raging, yelling, sobbing victim seems crazy, liar, unreliable. It might be worth talking about the title briefly. Okay. Would that be okay? Yeah. Initially, I chose the title Liars to, you know, Describe the husband and his affair partner, but as I continued writing the book, I realized that the biggest liar is Jane and her marriage has to end for her to stop lying about it, lying that it's okay to other people, but mostly to herself.

That is her, you know, if the word journey can be applied to this book, that is her journey. 

Zibby: It's sad, right? It's sad because she doesn't mean it. What you were gonna, no. Not sad. 

Sarah: No, no. I mean, like, I immediately said like, no, it's, you know, I thought, no, it's liberating, but like, of course it's sad. It is so sad.

Zibby: It's, it's liberating, uh, you know, to finally, you know, step into your own right and realize that what you thought was okay was not okay. And to take ownership and change, right. But it's so easy to just not get there. 

Sarah: It is so easy to just not get there. Jane almost didn't get there. 

But jane needed an external pressure to help her get there.

And it's so sad and so scary because she doesn't know the alternative. She assumes the alternative is worse. 

Zibby: Well, nobody knows cause you're only married. I mean, if it's your... 

Sarah: Exactly I know it's it's like how was your childhood I don't know I mean I could compare it to all the other childhoods I've had oh wait I just had the one so yeah exactly it's it's it's the unknown it's fear of the unknown and it's fear of leaving the known that has been sold as the best option.

Can I read one more passage? I would absolutely love that. 

Zibby: Okay, so after she's talking about, you know, this vacation and getting ready and blah, blah, blah, unpacking all this stuff, blah, blah, blah. You know, then they, you know, after driving, and I won't even go at the whole setup for this last paragraph, but after driving an hour into the woods and dosing the child with germamine, we failed to find the park John had chosen for our forest hike.

He criticized my driving constantly. So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, Workaholic, narcissistic bully with middle brow taste who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought. Rationalization. 

Sarah: Rationalization. I know.

Yeah. It's, it's like she's teetering on the edge of losing her ability to sell this marriage. as tolerable to other people. She's still, you know, she's, every time she sort of evaluates the marriage in this way, like after something really bad happens, she resells it to herself. And it's, it's like, she becomes.

Like an increasingly unreliable sales lady for, you know, for like selling her own marriage back to herself. But she's, yeah, during that, during that trip, she's sort of approaching the point at which it will no longer be possible. 

Zibby: I mean, I think it's probably a coping mechanism, right? The repackaging of the pain.

Sarah: Yes. And it's so easy to just look at somebody else's pain as an outsider and say, Oh, that's definitely worse than, than what I've got. Look, they're bleeding. I'm not bleeding. He's beating her up. He's not beating me up, 

Zibby: right? 

Sarah: Mine's mine's better. Yeah, no 

Zibby: one punched me It's probably 

Sarah: no 

Zibby: one punched me today Right.

No one left a mark. Yeah, there's always lines in the sand, right? Yes, a few minutes ago or something. Whatever you said, you know, you know about trauma intimately Can you talk about about that in your experience if you don't mind? 

Sarah: Yeah, sure. I I discovered the very thing that Jane discovers, which is that in a period of relative emotional danger, you know, there are, there are like physiological reasons that we, we can't lay down memories.

And I found that I was You know, I, I think of myself as like a very person with like a good analytic intelligence. And so I find myself reading documents, putting together my own divorce agreement with a lawyer and a mediator. I found that I would read something and then have absolutely, I mean, this doesn't seem that dramatic, but like for me, you know, for me and I, like, I, I live in words, you know, every, everything for me, like, as long as it's in language, I can, I can, I can process it.

I can understand it. I can communicate it. It would just be gone. And I would just think, Oh, no, I never read that. What is happening to me? And then, you know, this is, this is, I don't know whether this is comparative to other, other, um, divorced women's experiences, but I find, or I found for like the first year or two after my divorce, I would forget what was in my divorce agreement, just like basic things.

Basic things like how, how long a duration does this last, how you know this, this, this custody thing, this, this thing. And I would think, oh, that's so weird. Like, did I not read it? No, I've read it dozens of times. I just can't lay it down because the trauma was such that I was unable to it. It, it's still surprises me.

Like there's still things in that document that I look at and, and I can't hold onto. 

Zibby: It's interesting because I had a period of time where I was having trouble with my memory. 

So lots of doctors and all that. 

Sarah: Oh yeah and did they tell you that you needed to like have more regular periods or that you're depressed or that you needed to exercise and lose weight?

Zibby: Mom brain is a big one. 

Sarah: Oh, right. Mom brain. I know you're just a mom. You don't, yeah. You don't need that anymore. You don't need that. Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. It's normal. 

Zibby: But one thing that I, they also said that I found very interesting cause I would be like, I can never remember, and again, it's not a big deal, but like, I could never remember if I had washed my face or washed my hair or like, did I do this or did I not, and it wasn't because I was like, I, they said it has to also do with attention and how if you don't pay attention to what you're doing, you can't even imprint the memory to lose.

Sarah: Wow. 

Zibby: So, it's not that my memory necessarily was so bad, and this could be not true, but this was one of the things. It's not that my memory was getting worse, that I, it's that the memories weren't sticking to begin with. That, that things were happening and not staying interesting, right? 

Sarah: Wow. That is fascinating.

It doesn't surprise me. Was there a solution proposed to this problem that you were having? Or was it just sort of like, this is how it is now, honey? 

Zibby: Not exactly. It was a longer, I mean, it's a longer answer to that, but, um. 

Sarah: Oh, okay. Okay. 

Zibby: No, they ended up accidentally finding a brain tumor, which ended up being benign.

And then, but it was misdiagnosed. 

Sarah: Oh, Zibby. 

Zibby: No, no, it, I know it ended up all being fine. And it's, It turns out it wasn't actually a brain tumor. It's like a thing that's been there forever. 

Sarah: That sounds like a tumor. 

Zibby: That they found when they were doing an MRI. 

Sarah: But, okay. 

Zibby: No, it's not a tumor. It's called, it's like a cyst.

It's like a cyst, a benign cyst in the brain, which is very common and it doesn't, hasn't grown, but it is, yeah, fluid. It doesn't even. But it was misdiagnosed and I had to talk to all these brain surgeons and it was a whole thing and anyway. 

Sarah: Well, thanks science that it was found and thank feminism that there was the energy to even look for it.

I mean, we, this is a whole separate conversation, but, but yeah. I'm glad you're, I'm glad you're okay, or relatively okay, or okay er. 

Zibby: I am. I'm totally, yeah, I'm much better. I mean, I remember so many things, I mean, I could, yeah, my memory's really good right now. Although some things, my husband says I have like the worst memory.

I am divorced. I am remarried. So, anyway, there's that. 

Sarah: Oh, yeah, I would love to talk about that. 

Zibby: So, anyway. So, when you were writing this book. Like, how did this fit into the context of your day to day life and how long did it take? And like, when were you doing it and how, yeah, all of that. 

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So, so I don't, I don't always write books this quickly, but this book I wrote in less than two years, which for me is very fast during a high conflict divorce and being the primary parent to my young child during COVID.

And as soon as I finished it, I thought, Oh my God, I should always write books that fast. That was great. But obviously that's not how it works. It was, yeah, it's, it's just like every, every now and then a book is just very easy to write and it, I think it's just, it's a magical combination of having the energy.

Um, I was running purely on adrenaline, which any, you know, divorced mom probably has some familiarity with. And I hadn't known it, but the material had just been building up over the years, most of, or, you know, many of my friends are women with children who were, or are, or are again, married to men. And, um, there was just, um, you know, my brain did this amazing thing.

It just sort of said here, I've organized all this data into one, one, one thing, one thought. And all you, all you have to do is just empty that. And, uh, yeah, I don't know if I'm ever going to have the opportunity to write another book that quickly or that easily, but that, that is how the, that's how this one went.

Zibby: And how did you become a writer originally? 

Sarah: Oh, wow. Do I know? I don't know. Um, how did I become a writer? I resisted it for a long time. I grew up sort of aspirational middle class. I did well in school. It was communicated to me in all sorts of overt and covert ways that the best thing for a smart girl to do would be to go to college and then become a doctor.

So I went to college. I was pre med. I immediately found that, you know, with my My public school sort of not fantastic preparation for private college. Um, there was no way I was going to get through all of the pre-med classes with, you know, the grades that I had come to expect in my high school. So, uh, then I, then I just, I went through various things.

I thought I wanted to be an academic, I wanted to do classics, and I just sort of, yeah, I don't, I don't know, I don't know if, I don't know if everybody does this, but I just sort of like, I, I sort of just thought, oh, you know, I'm not good enough at that. I'm not good enough at that. I'm not good enough at that.

And then the one, the one thing that didn't feel like homework during college was a class on, uh, a poetry workshop. Which I took my last semester of college and, you know, I was very lucky to have heard of the MFA degree that it was a thing that one could apply to programs, but even when I was getting my MFA, I thought like, you know, I'll move back to New York and just, uh, you know, I'll be like a copy editor because I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a huge nerd and I'm very detail oriented and fussy and, you know, I had done that a bit beforehand.

And so, I mean, it was like extremely, I, I, you know, I received whatever, like, external validation. I'm like, oh, you should be a writer. But like, you know, I didn't, I couldn't really, I couldn't really say I'm, I'm mostly a writer and not just a copy editor at Windstar Communications, which is my, my job, for quite a few years after several books.

So, although, you know, I really love the sort of heroic narrative of like, knowing I wanted to be a writer. No, it, it was definitely when I was in a deep into adulthood that I, that I thought, you know, maybe this is, I should just, I was writing constantly, but it just didn't seem like, yeah, it didn't, it didn't seem real.

It's not that it didn't seem real, it just, it didn't seem valuable enough that I could make that a job. And until very recently, it wasn't, you know, you know, most of my income came from many others, all the other things that writers do, but I, but I guess that's fairly familiar and that I should, yeah. I had a mentor in graduate school, a poet.

Dean Young, and he, uh, you know, he was like a grown up poet with many books, taught in graduate programs, won prizes, published widely, etc. And he told our workshop class that when he was on an airplane and somebody asked him what he did, he never said poet. He just said, I'm a novelist. And then the person would be like, Oh, okay.

Yeah, I accept that as like a valid point. A valid way of, of describing oneself, but you know, it's like, what are you gonna say? I'm a troubadour or I'm a, you know, I'm a singer songwriter. Like you can do that, but yeah, no, there's all, there was like, there, there was a lot of, there's a lot of, I'll just say it's shame before I was able to say like, okay, yeah, I can, I can just be a writer.

I'm a writer. 

Zibby: Well, good for you. I'm glad you're finally owning it. Why not? 

Sarah: Thank you. It took, took a minute. 

Zibby: Yeah. That's great. And what are you working on now? 

Sarah: Yeah, right now I'm working on a new novel about aging. I recently turned 50 obsession and freedom. But before that is a collaboration with the cartoonist Liana Fink, you might know from her many books and her work in the New Yorker is a collaboration with Liana and hundreds of children.

And that book is called questions without answers. And it comes out next year. It's it's essentially an illustrated compendium of young children's questions. 

Zibby: Oh, all right. Interesting. 

Sarah: It's a, yeah, no, it's definitely like a, a, a, a, it was the fun side project that I got to do after just, you know, going deep and like really punishing myself emotionally while I was writing Liars.

Zibby: Wow. Well, I'm very excited for your next book. 

Sarah: Thank you. 

Zibby: Sarah, what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Sarah: My advice is not to be seduced by the idea of productivity, which has found its way into all, all, you know, works and practices and jobs and hobbies, because you can measure, you can measure the progress.

of your walk or your run by counting the miles. And then at some point it'll be done after you do all the miles, but art demands a different measure of progress because it's it's oceanic. It's growing in ways that you can't really articulate. The mind needs to wander and you can count your pages, but. In my experience, it doesn't really mean anything.

And churning out pages is sometimes it runs counter to the work that you want to be doing instead. So, yeah, I mean, if it starts feeling like homework, that's that's usually. My, my little red flag that I'm doing it wrong. Interesting. 

Zibby: Okay, I needed that advice myself today. Anyway, I love it. Thank you. 

Sarah: Oh, good.

Yeah, advice and horoscopes. You can always sort of like put it onto your life somehow. 

Zibby: I also read those. 

Sarah: Oh, me too. Big time. 

Zibby: Big time. All right. Well, Sarah, it was lovely to meet you. Congratulations on Liars and best of luck. 

Sarah: Thank you so much, Zibby. And This was great. Great fun. 

Zibby: Okay. Bye. Bye. 

Sarah: Bye.