Is divorce the new marriage plot? In Sarah Manguso’s latest novel, Liars, Jane meets John. She is a writer, he is an artist, both with serious ambitions. They marry, have a child. But while Jane’s writing career succeeds, John’s artistic dreams fizzle. John eventually becomes the breadwinner for the family, and Jane discovers, much to her dismay, that she has become a wife, a role she never desired. The unravelling of their marriage, and their subsequent divorce, is the plot of Liars. The novel pulses with a rare kind of anger, making it a compulsive, unforgettable read.
Love stories, it seems, are out. Divorce as liberation? Very much in. Other divorce books—including Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Miranda July’s All Fours and Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife—have also catapulted to the bestseller list in recent months. Brooklyn blogger Joanna Goddard has mined her own divorce for her popular blog Cup of Jo and New York magazine contributor Emily Gould shared her recent brush with it this winter. Model and writer Emily Ratajkowski revealed what she calls her “divorce ring” last year. “I would like there to be a perspective that allows space for the fact that leaving a relationship is often a remarkable and brave act,” she said to The New York Times at the time.
When Manguso’s publisher suggested I moderate a conversation between the author and Ratajkowski—who had shared on her Instagram Stories how much she liked the book—I was excited to see what would come of it. With me as their lucky moderator, they discussed their own experiences and the ideas presented in Liars.
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Thessaly La Force: Sarah, why did you want to write about divorce?
Sarah Manguso: I write about everything that ever happens to me. I’ve been keeping a voluminous diary for almost 30 years. The way that I process or complete any experience, thought or feeling I have is by translating it into language. When I got divorced very suddenly during COVID, it was inevitable that I would write about it.
Emily Ratajkowski: One of the things that I really admire about Liars are the very diaristic details of domestic responsibility, which stung and felt so familiar. Doing laundry. Various chores. Making lunch for your child.
Manguso: You’ve hit upon the central project of the book, which was to tell the story of a marriage without slipping into the vague summarising words that we use to describe it. I needed to tell the story in painstaking detail because not naming what the wife and husband do on a granular level literally enables abuse. I personally had a very vague sense of what a marriage ought to ideally be. I didn’t have a lot of great examples to draw from growing up, but something I heard all the time was that marriage takes work.
Does wifehood pose a larger threat to being an artist than motherhood?
Manguso: Jane goes into her marriage as many Gen X women did, assuming that she was entering into a partnership between equals. For the most part, she could convince herself that she was. When she has her child, she anticipates—as I did—that having a child would be ruinous to her art practice. For me, it was the fact that I’d become this entity that I had not anticipated: I was a wife. Despite Jane’s education and her previous career and the way that she wants to think about the partnership, she is not in that idealised, progressive equal partnership that she had anticipated or wanted. She is absolutely in thrall to a man’s ego.
Ratajkowski: I felt marriage was a romantic thing. I thought that it would ultimately be a partnership. I didn’t think about shared labour because, in the immortal words of Cardi B, “I don’t cook, I don’t clean. Let me show you how I got this ring.” After having a child I found myself accepting what was happening. I never cooked, and suddenly I was not just cooking but also being the breadwinner while simultaneously organising our social schedule and being the primary caretaker of our child. I’m really interested in the decisions we make in our lives, particularly as women. I would like to have conversations about how women survive marriage and children.
Manguso: The metaphor I envisioned was of a small celestial body just going a couple of meters out of orbit. It’s statistically negligible. And then in 10,000 years, you’re just like, “Oh my God, there’s no denying that something has happened.” Emily, you alluded to the fact that you were a famous, successful woman with a less famous, less successful man. I’m so hungry for insight into that arrangement.
Ratajkowski: I have a really complicated relationship with powerful men. I certainly didn’t want someone who needed me to feel small. I’m quite unpleasant around men who need that, even if they don’t make that explicitly clear; I tend to be aggressive and not particularly nice. I have often attracted men who like big personalities. And yet, by the end of my marriage, I found myself very much in the same position as Jane, which was that my world was suddenly extremely small and less important, less valuable. It was a slow devolution from “Oh, we’re partners, and this person respects all that I’m doing” to feeling like a possession. I had a deep understanding of misogyny in many ways because I’d not only been raised with parents who talked about it, but I also had very unusual and specific experiences around gender as a model. I really wanted to believe that we were past that.
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Manguso: When I mentioned the prospect of talking with you to a friend of mine, she said, “When you work as a model, the education that you get about the patriarchy means you age in dog years.” You probably know more about patriarchy than most women in their fifties, just by the proximity that you’ve had to powerful men, with having your image commodified and sexualised. But the fantasy that I’m clinging to now is that Gen Z cishet partnerships are not going to be as heteronormative as Gen X partnerships were. But these inequalities have also become more covert. People who are interested in taking advantage of other people in hetero partnerships are getting better at keeping the entitlement and the abuse undercover or managing to maintain a situation that Jane finds herself in, which is that every time she dares to complain about anything, John accuses her of being unstable or crazy.
What kind of damage occurs when a woman is called crazy by her partner?
Manguso: I hesitate to drag in the 10,000 examples from current events, from Amber Heard to Gabby Petito. It’s this archetypal story that women go crazy and their long-suffering husbands just don’t know where it came from. Jane knows it doesn’t look good. She’s raging and yelling and sobbing in the mediation meetings. She’s fantasising about smearing shit on John’s canvases. And yet Jane doesn’t even really quite understand that she’s in an abuse paradigm and she’s acting the way a traumatised, abused person ought to react. It was really important to me to represent infidelity as an absolutely reality-wrecking, sanity-destroying, destabilising experience.
Ratajkowski: The thing that really upsets me is how systematically crazy is used in divorce proceedings, particularly against women of colour or people from impoverished backgrounds. I’m a white, young woman with a decent amount of money. But I had to really watch my behaviour and control my responses. I’m still actually reeling from that. Making people question their reality is a fundamental pillar of abuse, physical or emotional. We don’t spend enough time talking about that. Betrayal trauma absolutely falls under that umbrella because you think you have one reality and someone has gone to great lengths to assure you that you exist in this reality and that you’re ultimately safe. And then you discover that you are not. One of the things that frustrates me is how much a mother is not allowed to be angry or to really be anything but just maternal in order to be a good mother. There are strange, cemented ideas around what things touch a child. A lot of them are about how the mother reacts to behaviour that is totally unacceptable from a man. It falls to the mother not only to endure this behaviour but also to keep her child from it. That horrifies me. I eventually found that if I demonstrate self-respect, my child is likely to have self-respect.
Manguso: Adding a child to a partnership really turns up the heat on every kind of patriarchal force that’s acting on a woman.
At some point in the book, someone tells the narrator that cheating is “a shockingly cruel form of abuse.” Is that true?
Manguso: Absolutely, yes. I was very surprised by how quickly my life came to resemble a kind of Greek tragedy during and after my divorce from a cheater. It wasn’t until afterwards that I began to shed this cultural baggage that I’d been carrying. Beliefs like, Cheating is cool. It’s a sexy hobby for sophisticated French people. If you think monogamy is expected or even desirable, you’re just super square and you must be some really religious person from a small town.
Ratajkowski: You’re a prude.
Manguso: Since my divorce, I have discovered that infidelity is highly correlated with coercive control and domestic violence, and virtually everybody who has committed an act of mass murder has preceded that act with what we call domestic violence, which is men abusing women physically and in every other way.
Throughout the novel, red flags keep popping up. I kept wanting to whisper, “Jane, get out of here.” I was in a really long relationship in my twenties where I stayed way too long and believed in something that wasn’t real. If I had read Liars then, I wonder if I would have left sooner. There was one line that reminded me of my experience, where Jane bargains with herself: She’s already spent five years, so why stop now?
Manguso: The sunk-cost fallacy is so seductive, isn’t it? Jane refers to her 10-year anniversary as a grand achievement. She’s so proud of herself because, like everything in America, it’s no pain, no gain. If you’re making progress, it’s supposed to feel bad. She’s applied this to a relationship with this person who is slowly destroying her. I now see the celebration of anniversaries as culturally suspect. If you need to recognise that you’ve achieved something each year, is that really a reason to continue doing it? I’m finally thinking critically about things that I accepted as just baked into the culture and therefore baked into my life. I’m grateful to be divorced. I’m really grateful.
Ratajkowski: There is a lot of talk about men, cheaters, lying. It is a terrifying thought if you’re a hetero woman because you feel like you can’t trust anyone. You might not be able to control other people or what’s going on culturally with heterosexual relationships or how men are raised and how they think of women, but you can change the way you think about marriage, what you’re owed and what life is for. That was something that definitely came to me out of my divorce. I have this new appreciation of time, and every second feels like a gift.
How does one, after something like divorce, keep your muscle to trust, so to speak, healthy and strong?
Ratajkowski: The first thing that came to mind is this idea from Audre Lorde about female instinct: For each of us women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful and tough as chestnut / stanchion against your nightmare of weakness” and of impotence. I believe in the female instinct and have witnessed its silencing. My anxieties and unhappiness and rage and all the things that I experienced in a domestic partnership, I now understand that they existed because I had been ignoring my instincts.
Community is also wonderful for raising children, and I think the nuclear family doesn’t make sense in today’s economy and society. Women just make too much money and have too much success to need a nuclear family in order to be successful parents. Decentralising men has been a huge part of my life. I still love men in many ways, but the Disney fairy tale I had once embraced of being chosen and building a life while being desirable to one man and keeping a man and all that, I just don’t find that interesting anymore. It’s opened so much space up in my life in so many incredible ways.
Manguso: I see now that there are many kinds of love. Once I exited this very lockstep, dyadic het-norm thinking, I found I had space for and can value the other relationships in my life. My female friendships occupy more space in my life now. As for the romantic part, I think the project is to figure out a way to be heterosexual, as I am, without being heteronormative.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
This article first appeared on Vogue.com
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