A Q&A with Sarah Manguso
First, for those who haven’t yet read Liars, what should our readers expect from your latest novel?
Liars is a novel about how an apparently progressive marriage between equals becomes a domestic abuse scenario.
Your narrator, Jane, writes from a very specific generation and point of view – you could say she is riding the coattails of second-wave feminism, and she expects that her marriage won’t succumb to the heteronormative man/wife dynamic, but the reality lets her down. How far do you think that this could be seen as a commentary of our current world, and do you have hope that this could change?
Jane is indeed surviving on the fumes of the second wave, and she is brutally disappointed by the reality of her marriage, along with most American women my age who are or have been partnered with men. I think the project for heterosexual women, going forward, is to find avenues toward sexual and romantic fulfilment that don’t involve traditional heteronormative constraints.
What are your thoughts on the phrase ‘domestic fiction’ and would you classify Liars as a work of domestic fiction? If not, what section of a hypothetical bookshop would you put Liars in?
“Domestic fiction” is a phrase that was used in the past to keep books by women out of the competition for attention, money, and prizes, which were generally reserved for books by a certain type of man, whose work was described merely as “fiction,” but I think most serious contemporary readers are pretty inured to marketing copy.
I am not a person who should be in charge of stocking or organizing any kind of store, for books or anything else, but I was an excellent chain bookstore employee in my teens, very good at dusting and shelving and neatening and manning the register and using the credit card reader that held those little packets with carbon paper and made duplicate (triplicate?) receipts.
Read full interview in nb. notes, our quarterly accompaniment to our Book Groups.
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