A Zibby Summer Reads Pick: Life and Love After Divorce, Sarah Manguso, LIARS
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and I am the host of this podcast, Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:08]I am also a newly minted USA Today best-selling author of the novel, Blake.
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[0:31]Sarah Mancuso is the author of Liars, a novel. She's the author of nine books, including
[0:37]very cold people, which was long-listed for the Penn Jeans Steiner word. Her other books include
[0:42]a short story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction,
[0:47]300 arguments, ongoingness, the Guardians, and the two kinds of decay, which was shortlisted
[0:54]for the welcome book prize. Her poems have appeared in four editions of the Best American
[0:59]Poetry Series, and her essays have appeared in Freeze, Harper's, McSweeney's, The New Yorker,
[1:04]The New Yorker View of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places. Her work has been
[1:08]recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship,
[1:14]a hotter fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her writing has been translated into 12 languages.
[1:19]She grew up in Massachusetts, and now lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at
[1:23]Antioch University, and gives manuscripts consultations through the shipment agency.
[1:29]Welcome, Sarah. Thank you so much for coming. On mom's, don't have time to read books to discuss
[1:33]your book, Liars, which by the way, I had to keep looking like a hundred times to make sure this was
[1:37]a novel. It's like it is a novel, right? Autobiographical? I don't know. Okay, I guess we're starting
[1:44]at least for having me. Okay, here I'll back up. Okay, Sarah, what is Liars about?
[1:51]Liars is a novel about just how easily a marriage between progressive-seeming people
[1:59]equals can evolve into a traditional marriage between a husband and a domestic abuse victim?
[2:06]Yes, so my joking question, it just felt to me so real, and there was so much detail over
[2:13]so much time. It is a feat, whether it's fiction or not, just even to have this many examples,
[2:20]and all those specific moments that you're like, oh, that's a good example. It's like they're
[2:25]quiet moments, but they're so important when they all build together. Oh yeah, I'm so glad to talk
[2:31]about this aspect of the book because I knew I needed to tell the story of this marriage to show
[2:37]what covert abuse really looks like in painstaking detail. For two reasons. The first reason is that
[2:44]all my life I've heard marriage takes work and all over the world abuse victims are thinking,
[2:48]oh, I guess this is the work that everyone's talking about, but we never really, or at least I
[2:53]had never really heard in detail what ought to constitute that work and what doesn't fall into
[2:58]that category of realistic work that a marriage partner ought to do. And when we don't talk about that
[3:07]like on a granular level, we enable abuse domestic abuse. And so that was why it was so important
[3:13]for me to pack the book with details because it's the critical mass of details that makes John,
[3:20]the husband's abuse impossible to deny. And, you know, the question of like, you know,
[3:27]is it real? Like did you get these from life? I mean, I will say that the number of women
[3:32]married to men who have read this book and said that the novel describes their marriage to a
[3:36]T is disturbing. Yeah, I can imagine that. Well, it's really powerful. And I literally felt like
[3:47]I was reading a diary. And yeah, like I was in it, I was really in someone's life in a way that
[3:53]not most, you know, it was it's almost like, you know, and people are like, oh, it's it's a character
[3:59]based novel. This is like the character was the marriage and it's like the marriage was the point of
[4:05]like, oh, I like that. I like that qualification. I've heard a couple of really amazing readings of the
[4:11]book besides that one, the feminist writer Liz lens, whom I love said that it's a who done it.
[4:18]And the, you know, the instigator is patriarchy. Like patriarchy did it. She said it more
[4:25]elegant way than then I just did. But yeah, I mean, I think I think it's just the, you know, my
[4:30]refusal to sort of align the events of the marriage into the way that marriage is often talked
[4:36]about, you know, it's private. It's behind closed doors is between two people, you know, both of
[4:41]them are, you know, both of them are responsible for what happens in marriage. No, a heteronormative
[4:47]marriage is between, as they said, a husband and an abuse victim. I mean, not always, but in this
[4:54]marriage, heteronormative, yeah, I mean, I would say like a, you know, traditional heteronormative,
[4:58]you know, a marriage like most heterosexual marriages, I think is, but, you know, of course,
[5:05]not all marriages. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think that's the other thing, right? Each marriage is so
[5:09]specific. Each relationship is so specific and contains multitudes, right? All these stories, all this
[5:17]background. And when you're trying to compare, and I think, you know, even in the book when it's
[5:22]like, oh, well, that person is, you know, compared to them, we're, we're okay, you know, like,
[5:27]think about how bad that is. Oh, yes. Yes, exactly. Like, oh, yeah, what Jane just went through.
[5:33]Oh, yeah, I would never go through that. My marriage is fine. Oh, wait. These next three things
[5:37]that actually are happening in my marriage is, you know, am I, am I Jane? Am I not Jane? Yeah,
[5:42]I mean, it's sort of like, it's counterintuitive because, you know, if you, if you put too many
[5:47]details and too many examples into a book, it's, it's like, it becomes turgid and hard to get
[5:51]through and boring, but like that. But yeah, no, I mean, it's, again, it just like, it seemed
[5:56]really important to just say like, look, you know, it's a paradigm of a husband. I've heard this
[6:02]from a couple of readers now, like a husband throws something away in the trash, but just sort of
[6:07]like balances it on the top of the trash for the help pushing it down. And that specific example
[6:13]really struck a nerve with, with several readers have reached out to me and said like, you know,
[6:17]I never thought about that in the sort of cornucopia of detail that my marriage is offering me,
[6:22]but like that I never realized that isn't infuriating. Yeah. Well, I literally, I don't know if
[6:28]you can see, I literally doggyered like every other. I love that. So I'm just going to pick one of
[6:33]these. Oh, great. If that's okay. Okay. I'm happy about this. Why are you so angry? My husband
[6:39]frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was
[6:44]exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn't that we'd been born angry. We'd become
[6:50]women and ended up angry. Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. Infants are
[6:56]angry. Have you ever sat all night holding a baby in the dark who's screaming right into your face?
[7:01]It changes you. Or so my husband used to say he'd done that one night, sat and been screamed at.
[7:07]I was sitting right next to him, but he always told the story as if he'd been the only one there.
[7:11]All the other days and nights it had just been me, but that one night had been the real game
[7:16]changer. Apparently my mother told me I'd been such a happy child. You loved everything she said.
[7:21]I became early though. I was precocious. I pitied men for having to stay the same all their lives
[7:27]for missing out on this consuming rage. Thank you so much for reading that. Yeah, that's a
[7:33]important passage for me. It's one of the few moments that Jane isn't dealing with a flurry of
[7:41]assorted emergencies. Like a moment where she actually has a minute to think. And whenever she
[7:46]has a minute to think, she feels, she's like, oh my god, I have four seconds to digest what just
[7:52]happened. I'm going to have an insight because I don't typically have time to have insights in
[7:58]my daily life. Yeah, the idea of an angry woman as an unreasonable woman or an angry woman
[8:05]as a crazy woman or as an unstable woman. These are words that abusers deploy to distract people
[8:14]from what they did to their victims to make them that way. And again, again, you see the crazy
[8:22]woman and the calm man, that's a domestic abuse paradigm that is still so easily overlooked.
[8:29]I mean, it's not about any one example in particular, but like to pick one,
[8:36]ripped from the news headlines of recent years, Gabby Petito, who was murdered by her husband.
[8:42]She and he both had police records. And before he murdered her, a police officer evaluated what
[8:52]was going on with them, they were fighting. They were fighting in their van. And Gabby got the
[8:57]worrying that time because she was just so unstable and she confessed to having reached out and
[9:03]scratched or hit the husband who would murder her. And the police officer read it the way that
[9:11]people were at it. You look at the person who's freaking out. I mean, she's obviously the problem.
[9:18]I would love for people to look at that paradigm. And instead, see, oh, that's obviously
[9:25]somebody who's been abused. Not like, that's somebody that just went crazy out of nowhere.
[9:32]It's a very entrenched narrative that women go crazy out of nowhere. And that so many
[9:39]men say that all their exes were nuts. Yes. Right. That's so common. Yeah. Because they went
[9:46]crazy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Another sort of facet of that sort of relation is something that I
[9:55]was thinking about as I was writing the last part of the book, the sort of
[10:00]final third of the final act of the book, after John leaves Jane. Oh, no, that's a terrible spoiler,
[10:05]but I don't know. Some people say, like, let's just say the final third of the book. Don't even
[10:11]say that, okay, okay, we'll agree to that part. Yeah, the final third, the third act.
[10:17]So in the third act of the book, the final third of the book, Jane starts having trouble
[10:24]recounting to herself what has just happened. And it was crucial for me to represent
[10:29]the way that trauma, abuse, is a kind of trauma, impedes a person's ability to remember things.
[10:36]Amber Heard was vilified for forgetting details about her relationship with Johnny Depp. And people
[10:43]said, oh, well, she's obviously lying because a liar has stories that are inconsistent.
[10:49]that can be true. But what is also very true and, you know, very scarily under understood or very
[10:59]scarily not widely understood, I guess, is that a traumatized person can't remember the memories
[11:08]form in safety, memories form in emotional safety. I know that from experience. And it is terrifying
[11:16]to have a traumatized mind, unable to remember things linearly or completely or consistently,
[11:28]you can remember and forget as Jane does until the trauma has passed. But until that happens,
[11:36]the, you know, unstable raging, yelling sobbing victim seems crazy liar unreliable.
[11:44]It might be worth talking about the title briefly. Okay. Would that be okay? Yeah. Initially,
[11:50]I chose the title liars to describe the husband and his affair partner. But as I continued writing
[11:59]the book, I realized that the biggest liar is Jane and her marriage has to end for her to stop
[12:07]lying about it, lying that it's okay to other people. But mostly to herself,
[12:14]that is her, you know, if the word journey can be applied to this book, that is her journey.
[12:19]It's sad, right? It's sad because she doesn't mean what you're going to know, not sad.
[12:25]No, no, I mean, like, I immediately said, like, no, it's, you know, I thought, no, it's liberating.
[12:30]But like, of course, it's sad. It is so sad. It's liberating, you know, to finally, you know, step
[12:37]into your own, right? And realize that what you thought was okay was not okay and to take ownership
[12:42]and change, right? But it's so easy to just not get there. It is so easy to just not get their
[12:51]Jane almost didn't get there. Yeah. Jane needed an external pressure to help her get there. Yeah.
[12:57]And it's so sad and so scary because she doesn't know the alternative. She assumes the alternative
[13:06]is worse. Well, nobody knows, because you're only married. I mean, if it's you're
[13:10]exactly right. I know. It's like, how was your childhood? I don't know. I mean, I could compare it
[13:14]to all the other childhoods I've had. Oh, wait, I just had the one. So yeah, exactly. It's, it's,
[13:20]it's the unknown. It's purely unknown and it's fear of leaving the known that has been sold
[13:28]as the best option. Can I read one more passage that I would absolutely love that? Okay. So after
[13:35]she's talking about, you know, this vacation and getting ready and blah, blah, unpacking all
[13:40]this stuff, blah, blah, you know, then they, you know, after driving and I wouldn't even go
[13:44]the whole setup for this last paragraph, but after driving an hour into the woods and dosing the
[13:49]child with jammamine, we failed to find the park. John had chosen for our forest hike. He criticized
[13:54]my driving constantly. So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant insecure workaholic narcissistic
[14:00]bully with middle brow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my
[14:06]input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought. Yeah. Rationalization. Rationalization,
[14:12]I know. Yeah. It's, it's like she's teetering on the edge of losing her ability to sell this
[14:21]marriage as tolerable to other people. She's still, you know, she's every time she sort of evaluates
[14:28]the marriage in this way. Like after something really bad happens, she resels it to herself and
[14:35]it's, it's like she becomes like an increasingly unreliable sales lady for, you know, for like
[14:44]selling her own marriage back to herself. But she's, yeah, during that, during that trip, she's
[14:49]sort of approaching the point at which it will no longer be possible. I mean, I think it's probably
[14:56]a coping mechanism, right? The repackaging of the pain. Yes. And it's so easy to just look at somebody
[15:04]else's pain as an outsider and say, oh, that's definitely worse than, than what I've got.
[15:09]Look, they're bleeding. I'm not bleeding. He's beating her up. He's not beating me up.
[15:14]Right. Mine's, mine's better. Yeah. No one punched me. It's right. No one punched me today.
[15:19]Right. No one left a mark. Yeah. There's always lines in the sand, right? Yes. A few minutes ago,
[15:27]or whatever, you said, um, you know, you know, about trauma intimately. Can you talk about
[15:31]about that in your experience, if you don't mind? Yeah, sure. I discovered the very thing that
[15:38]Jane discovers, which is that in a period of relative emotional danger, you know, there were
[15:47]there were like physiological reasons that we can't lay down memories. And I found that I was,
[15:56]you know, I think of myself as like a very like a person with like a good analytic intelligence.
[16:00]And so I, I found myself reading documents, you know, putting together my own divorce agreement
[16:07]with a lawyer and a mediator, I found that I would read something and then have absolutely,
[16:12]I mean, this doesn't seem that traumatic, but like for me, you know, for me, and like I,
[16:16]I live in words, you know, everything for me, like as long as it's in language, I can, I can process it,
[16:21]I can understand it, I can communicate it, it would just be gone. And I would just think,
[16:25]oh, no, I never read that. What is happening to me? And then, you know, this is, this is, I don't
[16:30]know whether this is comparative to other, other divorced women's experiences, but I find,
[16:38]or I found for like the first year or two after my divorce, I would forget what was in my
[16:47]divorce agreement. Just like basic things, basic things, like how long iteration does this last
[16:52]how, you know, this, this custody thing, this, this thing. And I would think, oh, that's so weird,
[16:58]like, did I not read it? No, I've read it dozens of times. I just can't lay it down because
[17:05]the trauma was such that I was unable to. It's still surprises to me. Like, there's still things
[17:12]in that document that I look at and I can't hold on to. It's interesting because I had a period of
[17:18]time where I was having trouble with my memory, so lots of doctors and all of that. Oh, yeah,
[17:24]did they tell you that you needed to like have more regular periods or that you're
[17:28]depressed or that you needed to exercise and lose weight? Mom, mom brain is a big one. Oh, right,
[17:33]mom brain. I know you're just a mom. You don't, yeah, you don't need that anymore. You don't need
[17:37]that. Like, oh, yeah, right. Yeah, it's normal. But one thing that I, they also said that I found
[17:43]very interesting because I would be like, I can never remember. And again, it's not a big deal,
[17:47]but like, I could never remember if I had washed my face or washed my hair or like, did I do this
[17:52]or did I not? And it wasn't because I was like, I, they said it has to also do with attention
[17:59]and how if you don't pay attention to what you're doing, you can't even imprint the memory to lose.
[18:05]Wow. So it's not that my memory necessarily was so bad and this could be not true, but this was
[18:13]one of the things. It's not that my memory was getting worse, that I, it's that the memories
[18:18]weren't sticking to begin with that things were happening and not staying. Interesting, right?
[18:24]That is fascinating. It doesn't surprise me. Was there a solution proposed to this problem that
[18:31]you were having or was it just sort of like, this is how it is now, honey? Not exactly.
[18:36]It was a longer, I mean, it's a longer answer to that, but okay, okay. No, they ended up accidentally
[18:42]finding a brain tumor, which ended up being benign and then, but it was missed. No, no, I know it ended
[18:47]up all being fine. And it's, it turns out it wasn't actually a brain tumor. It's like a thing
[18:52]that's been there forever. That sounds like a tube that they found when they were doing an MRI.
[18:56]But, okay. No, it's not a tumor. It's like a cyst. It's like a cyst, a benign cyst in the brain,
[19:02]which is very common and it doesn't hasn't grown, but it is, yeah, fluid. It doesn't even,
[19:08]but it was missed diagnosed and I had to talk to all these brain surgeons and it was a whole
[19:12]thing in any way. Well, thanks science that it was found. And thank feminism that there was
[19:19]the energy to even look for it. I mean, this is a whole separate conversation, but yeah.
[19:26]No, I'm glad you're okay. We're relatively okay. We're okay. I'm totally, yeah, I'm much better.
[19:33]I mean, I remember so many things. I mean, I could, yeah, my memory is really good right now.
[19:37]Although some things, I haven't said something. I have like the worst memory. I am divorced,
[19:41]I am remarried. So anyway, there's that. Oh, yeah, I would love to talk about that.
[19:48]So anyway, so when you were writing this book, like, how did this fit into the context of your day-to-day
[19:55]life and how long did it take and like when were you doing it and how, yeah, all of that?
[20:00]Okay, 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.
[20:18]And as soon as I finished it, I thought oh my god, I should always write books that fast. That was great.
[20:24]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 I think it's just it's a magical combination of having the energy.
[20:38]I was running purely on adrenaline, which any, you know, divorced mom probably has some familiarity with.
[20:46]And I hadn't known it, but the material had just been building up over the years, most of her, you know, many of my friends are women with children who were or are or are again married men and there was just you know my brain did this amazing thing.
[21:04]And 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.
[21:12]And 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.
[21:20]And how did you become a writer originally.
[21:22]Oh wow.
[21:23]Do I know how did I become a writer.
[21:27]I resisted it for a long time.
[21:29]I grew up sort of aspirational middle class.
[21:33]I did well in school.
[21:35]It was communicated to me and all sorts of over in covert ways that the best thing for a smart girl to do would be to go to college and then become a doctor.
[21:45]So I went to college.
[21:48]I was pre-med.
[21:50]I immediately found that you know with my my public school sort of not fantastic preparation for private college.
[22:01]There was no way I was going to get through all the pre-med classes with you know the grades that I had come to expect in my high school.
[22:09]So then I then I just I went through various things. I thought I wanted to be an academic. I wanted to do classics.
[22:16]And I just sort of yeah, I don't know. I don't know if everybody does this, but I just sort of like I sort of just thought oh you know I'm not good enough at that.
[22:24]I'm not good enough at that. I'm not good enough at that.
[22:26]And then the one the one thing that didn't feel like homework during college was a class on a poetry workshop which I took my last semester of college.
[22:39]And you know I was very lucky to have heard of the MFA degree that it was a thing that one could apply in a program.
[22:49]But even when I was getting my MFA I thought like you know I'll move back to New York and just you know I'll be like a copy editor because I'm you know I'm a huge nerd and I'm very detail oriented and fussy and I had done that a bit beforehand.
[23:05]And so I mean it was like extremely I you know I received whenever like external validation of like oh you should be right 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 when star communications which is my job for quite a few years after several books.
[23:28]So although you know I really love the sort of heroic narrative of like knowing I wanted to be a writer.
[23:35]No it was definitely when I was in a deep into adulthood that I that I thought yeah maybe this is I should just give in you know I was writing constantly but it just didn't seem like yeah it didn't it didn't seem.
[23:51]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 most of my income came from many others all the other things that writers do.
[24:05]But I guess that's fairly familiar that I should be on.
[24:09]I had a mentor in graduate school a poet Dean Young and he you know he was like a grown up poet with many books taught in graduate programs one prize is published widely etc.
[24:21]And he told our workshop class that when he was on an airplane and somebody asked him when he did he never said poet.
[24:30]He just said I'm a novelist and then the person will be like oh okay yeah I accept that as like a valid.
[24:36]A valid way of describing oneself.
[24:39]But you know it's like what are you going to say I'm a troubadour or I'm a you know I'm a singer song right like you can do that.
[24:46]But yeah now there's a lot there was like there was a lot of there's a lot of I'll just say shame before I was able to say like okay yeah I can I can just be a writer I'm a writer.
[24:58]Well good for you I'm glad you finally owning it.
[25:00]Thank you took took a minute yeah that's great.
[25:04]And what are you working on now anything yeah right now I'm working on a new novel about aging I recently turned 50 obsession and freedom.
[25:14]But before that is a collaboration with the cartoonist liana think you might know from many books and her work in the New Yorker is collaboration with liana and hundreds of children.
[25:26]And that book is called Questions Without Answers and it comes out next year it's essentially an illustrated compendium of young children's questions.
[25:36]All right interesting it's it yeah no it's it's definitely like a it was the fun side project that I got to do after just you know pour it out going deep and like really punishing myself emotionally while I was writing liars.
[25:51]Well I'm very excited for your next book.
[25:54]Thank you Sarah what advice do you have for aspiring authors.
[25:57]advice is not to be seduced by the idea of productivity which now has found its way into all all you know works and practices and jobs and hobbies.
[26:13]Because you can measure you can measure the progress of your walk or your run by counting miles and then at some point you'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.
[26:34]So 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.
[26:47]So yeah I mean if it starts feeling like homework that's that's usually my little red flag that I'm doing it wrong.
[26:55]It's interesting.
[26:56]I needed that advice myself today.
[26:59]I love it.
[27:00]Thank you.
[27:01]Oh good.
[27:02]Yeah advice and horoscope.
[27:03]You can always put it out to your life somehow.
[27:06]I also read this.
[27:08]Big time.
[27:09]Big time.
[27:10]All right well Sarah it was lovely to meet you congratulations on liars and yeah.
[27:16]That's so much.
[27:17]Thank you so much.
[27:18]This was great.
[27:19]Great fun.
[27:20]Bye bye.
[27:23]Thanks for listening to momstone have time to read books.
[27:26]If you love it please leave a review and follow us on social at City Owens and at City Readers.