In both her 2016 and 2018 Netflix comedy specials, Ali Wong was seven months pregnant. In both, she wore skintight minidresses in wild prints. She looked feral, grouchy, and ready to spring. It was striking. Her latest, Single Lady, is about her life after divorcing her husband of ten years. She wears a bow-necked white maxi dress/nightgown. Only her arms are exposed, and the look conveys someone older, richer, and more powerful—more Goop—than the Wong in stretchy minis. In Single Lady, the end of Wong’s marriage is a little sad, because of the kids, but it is mainly a rom-com full of sex and jewelry and snappy answers to stupid questions. MILF Boss on NBC. She dumps one suitor who is lazy in the oral sex department. He parries and mansplains that, actually, Wong needs to communicate with him, use her words, let him know exactly what she wants during sex. Wong furrows her brow and then her whole rubbery adorable face, pauses, then yells, “You think I got divorced from one man to communicate obvious shit to another man? Fuck that lateral step!” She’s angry and hilarious.
Divorce is bitterly funny. During mine, I laughed occasionally—at the spite, delusions, and impotent freakouts that made me think of a shopping-mall gorilla flinging his excrement—but not in a triumphant way. I was scared for my future, humiliated by the ugliness, ashamed about what the children had seen and heard. As I scrambled to find a place for the three of us to live, my main shock was that I’d been such a chump. I’d blithely thrown my lot (and my kids) in with someone as if I couldn’t be thrown back. I didn’t protect myself, even though I knew better. Wong with her millions of dollars and her fame and her gorgeous nerd looks only improving with age (she’s forty-two) is believably making lemonade. I liked the power pose, but in my chump1 state, it wasn’t the right art form to start making sense of the last fifteen years. I needed Liars.
“In the beginning I was only myself,” Jane, a thirtyish literary writer of some renown, tells us in Sarah Manguso’s short, sharp marriage plot. “Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.” Then love strikes—like lightning or a fist. Jane meets a charming Canadian named John at an upstate New York film festival (he’s a director, among other things), and their sexual chemistry is immediate and overwhelming, a “ferocious hunger” that she can’t quite explain. The first time John visits her in her apartment back in New York City, she blurts out, “You’re real”—a spell is cast. Suddenly his ambitions and perspective are very concrete, while her priorities have scattered in the shadow of . . . what? At first, she thinks her diminished state has to do with his talent. “I felt dull when I remembered that John could write, draw, and make photographs and films, while I could only write,” she self-deprecates. At his suggestion, they both apply for a prestigious arts fellowship. Then, he scrambles her inputs: he mentions he’d been caught dating two women at once, lays “his cards on the table” that he wants to marry her, borrows $8,000 from her for a film he never makes. Jane asks for a boundary with his ex-girlfriend, Naomi, who acts as if she and John are still a thing. John explains that he can’t because Naomi is so (voice hushed to a whisper) “unstable.” Still, Jane is pinching herself for her luck: this man “thought clearly, felt deeply, worked hard, made art, was dark and handsome, and wanted to marry me. I’d ordered à la carte and gotten everything I’d wanted.”
Forgetting Virginia Woolf’s bottom line that one needs a room of one’s own and a small income in order to write, Jane leaves her apartment, where she’d written her first books, to live with John. They are both artists, and she the more successful of the two, yet from their first moments together, Jane does most (all) of the housework. Sure, sometimes Jane enjoys LARPing domesticity and using cloth napkins, but pretty quickly she’s drained by the barrage of cooking, cleaning, laundry, packing, unpacking, and freezing perishable comestibles he bought on a whim. Jane feels “foul shame about his reckless spending,” but, not only is John dismissive of her “crazy” neurotic frugality, he berates her for not making more money. Virginia Woolf has become Cinderella and, failing to “find time” to write, she blames herself—if only she were more organized or simply made art her priority, as John seems to be able to.
John fails to get the prestigious fellowship (Jane gets it), and his gallery soon grows tired of his half-assed work, so John discards his multi-hyphenate art persona to become an “entrepreneur,” a word Jane has to practice saying to pry off the scare quotes. What this means: John is “the” breadwinner and Jane is trapped. John darts off to Calgary (to meet with investors he says). They move from New York to LA to New York every few years, based on his needs. She could get lucrative teaching gigs, but they’d require her staying in one place. She turns that energy into home economics, reducing their expenses by managing their household admin and daily chores.
Jane gives birth, adds several billion daily tasks to her life, and now she is really trapped. John travels as needed for his life. Jane’s life as an abandoned wife with a newborn is easier than when her husband reenters the household: “I felt exhausted by John’s return—the mess, the dirt, the intolerably slow rate of completing tasks, the constant assumption that I wanted to watch videos on the internet.” By the time the pandemic hits, and their child is sentient, Jane is a martyr mom, smile-grimacing her way through Zoom school and the lonely humiliation of their nonstop family time. She’s amazed by how much she loves the child and committed to keeping the adult hostility contained. “I realized I didn’t care what he thought of me or even how he treated me, as long as the child didn’t see or know.” Like a prisoner scratching hatch marks onto her cell wall, she thinks “fourteen more years until college.” This is Grimm stuff.
Manguso is the author of several books of prose and poetry and the winner of major prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and the Rome Prize. Her epigrammatic approach here, short scenes of married life, is propulsive and ominous and so very familiar. I was shocked to read transgressions I assumed could not be universal—John’s text after an ugly fight doesn’t contain an apology but does share that he has diarrhea, for instance—on many pages. My copy of Liars is marked up with check marks and exclamation points and “exactly!” Jane and John and the child and mother-in-law Eve have names that are both generic and narratively totemic. Jane’s friends all share names with characters on Girls. Manguso’s Jane is tragic because she is so smart and successful and knew better, but still became that most tragic cliché—the wife, draining her brain cells and life force on vacuuming and bitching about her husband. Her anger and her insights are real, but they have no material impact on, well, anything. She vents to her friend Hannah that “tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrank away when my father tried to touch her. She was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of the rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid.” Bestie Hannah (on her second marriage) commiserates, and the rage dissipates to be replaced by a martyr’s sense of, perhaps, superiority.
The scariest moments in the book are when Jane has flashes of dire clarity and instead of escaping, scrambles to plug herself back into the matrix. To the random guy who found John drunk and covered in vomit (she is eight months pregnant), she writes a flowery thank-you for bringing John (who never drinks like that!) home to her so that their unborn child will have a father. She writes a soppy letter to her mother-in-law Eve, who is dying from cancer: “When I first met John and saw that he admired strong women, I knew he must have a strong mother. Thank you for the love you gave him, and for raising him to be a funny and gentle person. I know you must be so proud of him. I’m so glad I found him.”
Eve, meanwhile, is on her deathbed sucking a fentanyl lollipop and has no time for that fairy tale. Instead, Eve tells Jane about how, when she was about to marry John’s father, her parents offered to pay for a year in Europe if she’d break up with him. Back at home, Jane gives her brain a good shake, erasing the Etch A Sketch, and sets to write out Christmas cards. She tells herself that John is proud to be married to someone so competent and talented and (yes) self-sacrificing as she is. The division of labor was unfair, sure, but knowing she is loved and appreciated made it all worthwhile. “John worked hard to support us. I’d just sold another book. I felt embarrassed by my luck.”
The critic Laurie Stone writes about TV shows I may never see in ways I love to read. For example, Stone says that the protagonist in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (season 3, HBO) “ends up a writer . . . writing about what Ferrante writes about,” which is “the impossibility of romantic love between men and women because of the unfairness of their lives. The unfairness of their lives in every moment shows the girl how the world works and puts the mind of the boy to sleep.”
Reading the critic Brian Dillon, who reviewed Liars in the New York Times Book Review, I wondered if he’d nodded off a bit when he wrote “the aggrieved wife who narrates Sarah Manguso’s novel may or may not be a reliable source about her monster of a husband.” All due respect, but this is not a book about two neurotic people in a bad marriage nor is Jane a Holden Caulfield. Was it insane, diabolical, or merely ironic that this book was assigned to a fifty-five-year-old white male aesthete? Jessica, my sister, texted a link to the review and commented “Fucking NYT!” but her text autocorrected to “Fucking NUTS!” which also worked. “What guy would get it?” Jess continued. “Seriously, Liars is written in a secret language only women can hear.”
We create language for things that matter enough to be described, which is why the particular humiliation that is a husband cheated on by a wife is named cuckold. Or cuck. The humiliated woman who is cheated on by her husband is just a wife. In his review, Brian Dillon ponders ponderously: “How to know when you are telling stories to those you love, let alone to yourself?” Brian, you know, of course you know. Jane knows from the first page where she writes, “In the beginning, I was only myself. . . . Then I married a man, as women do.” Thus cursed, Jane was transformed to a state lowlier than a frog. Her fate a true tragedy for a writer: ensconced in a “story that had already been told ten billion times.” Jane escapes the cliché when she plummets into the terror Ferrante described so well in her novel The Days of Abandonment (2002).
As Jane and John’s domestic tension escalated in utterly mundane and relatable ways, I couldn’t stop thinking that Liars was a terrific horror story about a Gen X heterosexual marriage of “equals.” Gaslight, but scarier, because Jane gaslights herself. It reminded me of a moment in couples’ therapy when it was just me and our therapist. She asked if I saw that fixing the relationship wasn’t a question of me explaining myself clearly enough, because my husband had zero interest in how I felt about anything. I did see this, though it hurt to acknowledge it after fifteen years. The truth often hurts, and yet it is safer than lying to yourself. As Jane Ward writes in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (NYU, 2020), “People cannot be rescued from forms of suffering that they themselves relate to as badges of honor.”
“I need to get a real job again,” I said to my therapist, meaning one with health benefits and a 401(k), not running a feminist press and cooking dinner every night.
“It’s like you are waking up,” she said, making meaningful eye contact, “from a spell.”
- I use “chump” in its Tracy Schorn-ian form. Schorn is the creator of Chumplady.com and author of the bestselling Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life (Hachette, 2016) ↩︎
