Author Sarah Manguso on Men, Marriage, and Writing Out of Rage

LIT July 24, 2024 Sarah Manguso, photographed by Lisa Locascio Nighthawk. There’s a note on my phone that contains 24 phrases cut and pasted from Sarah Manguso ’s new novel, Liars . Some representative selections: “I grew up half crazy”; “Penetrative session”; “Slimy panties”; and “He’s the engine by which I learn what is left of my life.” I compiled it during the feverish day I gulped down the book, the story of a marriage told by the woman transformed into a wife within its grindhouse captivity. “I floated facedown in housewifery,” Jane observes of the decade-plus spent attempting to secure stability in a relationship with an unreliable, would-be artist. “I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.” The book’s language is taut and unflinching, captivating as a car accident, told with a confidence that is both funny and unnerving. The precise descriptions for which Manguso is known have been sometimes mistaken for terseness or remove, a judgment slyly deconstructed by her 2022 novel Very Cold People , a book of observations, set in small-town, 1990s Massachusetts , that amount to a mountainous indictment of sexual violence. The insights therein, like those of Liars , demonstrate the damage wrought by the hierarchical systems of propriety and control that define the institutions of family and marriage. One recent afternoon, Manguso welcomed me to her Santa Monica home. She served me fresh-baked rosemary shortbread and grapes and introduced me to her cat, Pebble. We talked about self-deception, domestic life, Goodreads, and what it really means to say that marriage is “work.” ——— LISA LOCASCIO NIGHTHAWK: Is there a question you really want to be asked that no one’s asked you? SARAH MANGUSO: “How do you stay so sexy?” No, that’s not a question I want to be asked. NIGHTHAWK: That’s a great question, though. How do you stay so sexy? MANGUSO: I have tons of sex. NIGHTHAWK: That’s a good answer, and actually a really good place to start. I don’t know if you know this about my book, but what I thought I was writing a book […]

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