When a Woman Turns into a Wife

Jenessa Abrams reviews “Liars” by Sarah Manguso in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s essay about her sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, and her mother Alice Munro’s silence.

By Jenessa AbramsJuly 23, 2024

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

SHORTLY AFTER Alice Munro died, a line from the title story of her 2009 collection Too Much Happiness began circulating on the internet: “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind […] When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”

The quote appeared in white font over a black background. The only attribution was to Munro, so at the time, I assumed it was something she had said in an interview. It felt piercingly ironic that the female winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was being remembered for a remark she made about women’s supposed inability to live outside the context of men.

Then, I learned the line was delivered by a character in “Too Much Happiness,” Munro’s fictional account of a real 19th-century woman, Sofya Kovalevskaya. Shortly afterward, the world learned of the sexual abuse Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, experienced as a child from her stepfather, Munro’s second husband. An abuse that Munro herself had learned of decades ago and chose to ignore.

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I sent a different version of this piece to my editor days before Skinner published her devastating and poignant essay about the abuse in the Toronto Star. When I wrote that first version, the connection between Munro and her work felt straightforward. So did the connection between “Too Much Happiness” and the book I’d set out to review: Sarah Manguso’s sophomore novel, Liars (2024). Both stories confront the impossibility of marriage for women who long for an identity outside of it. For women who wear the title of wife as a shackle. For women whose husbands view their independence as a threat. For women whose husbands need to be held and coddled.

As the world now knows, Munro chose to stay married after learning about her husband’s sexual violence. She rejected her then nine-year-old daughter’s innocence and blamed her as an adulterer. Where does one go from here? A wife learns of her husband’s evil and chooses him anyway. The evil is done to her child. The wife is a woman is an author is a mother. The child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child.

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This piece was never meant to be about Munro. It was meant to be about Liars and women who are erased by men—as, for many years, was the fate of the fictionalized Sofya Kovalevskaya and the silenced Andrea Skinner. That erasure is not only done by men, of course. There are also the women who enable them.

In “Too Much Happiness,” Munro retells the story of Sofya, a Russian mathematician who lived during the late 1800s and whose findings on partial differential equations made her the most significant female scientist of her time. (Here, I use the Russian spelling Sofya to distinguish between the real woman and the fictional character whose name Munro altered to Sofia.) In addition to being a mathematician and an author, Sofya was a wife and a mother—though her marriage was a formality she orchestrated to leave Russia to pursue an advanced education, and her child was sent to live with relatives so that Sofya could remain dedicated to her work. In Munro’s story, Sofia is rendered a bit like a schoolgirl due to her all-consuming love for the man she intends to marry.

Like many, I have assigned myself the task of reconsidering Munro’s authorial intent as it relates to the inner lives of the fictional women and children in her stories; though one’s intent can be easily manipulated into a digestible excuse, perhaps of the same sort that allowed Munro to stay with her husband in the face of proven abuse. I have done this somewhat involuntarily, knowing it’s probably the wrong task altogether, as it further centers Munro instead of Skinner—Munro, who chose to view her daughter’s sexual violation as a betrayed wife instead of as a mother.

Toward the end of her life, Sofya fell in love but never intended to marry, perhaps understanding the contractual realities of a woman binding herself to a man. Munro’s reimagined Sofia is engaged to her lover and acknowledges that she is unable “to think of anything but him”; this “at the very time when she should [be] working day and night.” Ultimately, it is Sofia’s impending nuptials to this man—who retreats emotionally after she receives a major award because, in the glow of her success, “he had felt himself ignored”—that is the too much happiness that kills her. In this way, the narrative suggests that the marriage of equals is impossible.

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Initially, I understood the decision to explore Sofia’s softness as a gesture toward her humanity. Now, in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s truth, I read Sofia’s acceptance of the man’s volatile misogyny as compliance. In either interpretation, Munro’s message feels clear: when a woman loves a man with the whole of her self, there is no self left for her. Nor—as we’ve recently been reminded—is there any left for her child.

Manguso’s Liars is an extension of this thought. A woman marries a man. The woman is a writer. The man is an artist who writes and draws and takes pictures. For the course of their marriage, the man disappears into his studio to make objects he calls art, then embarks on a series of ill-conceived business ventures, relocating the couple six times, while spending his off hours playing video games, drinking to excess, and making expensive purchases on the marital credit card. The woman is forced to abandon academic job post after job post, adjuncting instead of pursuing a professorship—cooking, cleaning, laundering, packing, unpacking, repacking, toilet scrubbing, joint tax filing, refinancing, grocery shopping, bill paying, dishwashing—all instead of writing. Then the woman becomes pregnant and must assume the role of being someone’s mother in addition to the role of being someone’s wife.

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“In the beginning I was only myself,” the woman reflects in Liars’ opening lines. “Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone. Then I married a man, as women do.” After they marry, the woman’s life becomes a story she’s heard 10 billion times, a story about what happens to a woman when she is remade into a wife. The fate of this particular marriage is revealed in the jacket copy—which initially struck me as a misstep, as knowing the ending inevitably alters the way we experience each scene—but the novel is less about what happens within this marriage than about the stories of that happening that the narrator both creates and lives within.

Like Russian nesting dolls, one story fits inside another. It starts the way most marriages do: “[My husband] was the main character, and I was his wife.” In Russian, the name for those female figurines is matryoshki, which translates to “little matrons.” The word matron has two notable definitions: “a woman in charge of domestic and medical arrangements” (per Concise Oxford English Dictionary) and “a female animal kept for breeding” (Merriam-Webster). The woman in Liars becomes both:

When I asked [my husband] if he’d be better off with a servant-wife than a human wife, he said, I get up and shower and have breakfast waiting for me, and nine times out of ten you do the laundry and think about dinner and remind me to mail things and make phone calls … I can’t imagine anyone being more helpful.

He gave me a look of love. I felt wonderful. Then I felt trapped.

These moments of stinging awareness populate the novel. In each, we feel the narrator flutter her eyelids open, as if finally waking to her life, only to watch her promptly clamp them shut, renarrating the happening to maintain the story of a happy marriage she’s swallowed: “I told myself that when I felt hurt, it was because I was carrying damage left from something else, inflicted in childhood, not by my husband. Look, my wound. But he hadn’t made the wound. And that was my new story.”

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A Russian nesting doll must be hollow to fit each consecutive smaller doll inside of her. A woman becomes cavernous when she digests one story about herself and then another—that she is hysterical, that she is a control freak, that she is asking for it, that she is angry, that she is crazy.

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A lie is a kind of story we tell—to ourselves, to others. When we’re good storytellers, we start believing these stories, hence the plurality of this novel’s title. Both the husband and the wife are liars. The novel we’re reading is at once the story the wife has constructed—“The reality I wanted didn’t include this event, so I stepped around it and continued on”—as well as the story of her becoming aware of said construction.

The arrival of that awareness is achingly slow, an experience made even more acute by the narrator’s frequent recanting of the happening, recasting her husband as the hardworking breadwinner or the serious artist or the considerate partner, though his true nature is clear to the reader from the novel’s beginning. One wonders about the obvious here, about what the woman actually does not see and what she actively chooses to ignore—which is another question of complicity. One could argue that Manguso crafted the novel intending to have the reader see what the narrator cannot: an act that forces the reader to both hold and absorb the abuse that goes unacknowledged until the narrator herself comes to confront it. A dynamic not unlike that of abusive relationships: When you’re inside one, your world extends only as far as your wingspan, if that. The walls are tight around you, your arms may well be bound, you are confined inside a cage that, for a long time, may not be visible even to you. Perhaps you have become one of the smaller nesting dolls lodged inside the hollow facade of a happy woman.

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In Liars, the husband’s favorite story is that his wife is crazy. The narrator remarks that “calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her,” yet still asks herself: “But wait—was I crazy?” She questions her sanity in part because her husband’s narrative isn’t simply arbitrary misogyny. Instead, he has weaponized the history of a psychiatric hospitalization that occurred in her youth, contorting the experience into a story of female hysteria to make her believe she is inferior. By feeding her a story of instability, he attempts to lessen her autonomy and turn himself into a hero for loving her.

When, just like Sofia in “Too Much Happiness,” the narrator of Liars is awarded a major prize, she must contend with the reality that her success will be experienced as an affront to her partner. Both men perceive the women’s achievements—as men often do—as reflections of their own inadequacy and threats to their power. The most trodden path to reducing a woman’s independence is to impregnate her. “Lately [my husband] seemed to think we could have a child, but I didn’t think two artists could raise a child,” says the narrator, “there must be a wife somewhere.”

Of all the stories the woman absorbs about the roles women inhabit in the domestic space, it is the one about motherhood that she’s ultimately wrong about. She fears that bearing a child will turn her into a wife without recognizing that she has already become one:

By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of [my husband]’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed. [My husband] had gotten up and taken a shit.

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In a sense, motherhood and wifehood are two sides of the same coin: roles that demand the entirety of a woman’s selfhood. But the difference between loving a child and loving a spouse is that the former shouldn’t have to earn your love, whereas the latter is meant to sustain and reciprocate it. Initially, the carnal responsibilities of motherhood leave the narrator so depleted that she’s incapable of thought, let alone the production of art. But it is ultimately the act of mothering her child that both breaks and rebuilds her:

My personality and life had been swallowed by motherhood, and every few days, my husband threw the fact that I didn’t have a full-time job in my face. The work of caring for the baby was invisible to him.

The child tantrummed until he choked himself quiet, but a couple of days before that, he’d tried to pick up a freckle from my arm.

The narrator presents the behavior of her husband and her child in direct relation to one another, reflecting their roles as doubles of each other. Each time one blunders, they return with a gentleness that erases the hurt. Or the inverse. In the husband’s case, each instance of care is truncated by an act of emotional violence. The child’s stumbles are forgiven because of his innocence, which only magnifies the husband’s infantilism.

But a husband is not a child. At least, he shouldn’t be.

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One morning, the narrator’s child announces that he doesn’t want to go to school because everyone stares at him. The woman responds by crafting “a story about a Little Bear [experiencing] the same thing.” Under the guise of this narrative, she asks her child why he thinks everyone is staring at Little Bear. Her child’s answer reveals that he has presumed everyone wants to hurt him and that presumption has in turn become his reality. The woman presents an alternative: “Maybe the other bears are thinking […] Will he be my friend? And Little Bear thought and thought about this. And that day, Little Bear made two new friends.” When she drops the child off at school, she turns back to see that he is “happily playing in the water tub with a tiny friend.”

By reconstructing her child’s experience through storytelling, the woman gives him an alternative interpretation he can choose to live inside of. All our lives are stories—stories that we tell and that are told to us about our hurts and dreams and loves and desires—and those stories become our truth. Later, the child breaks down in tears and sends himself to his room. He leaves a note outside the door that reads: “Time Out.” When the narrator goes to check on him, she finds him “calmly working on a Lego project like a self-knowing god.” The child has learned how to soothe himself, which really means that he has learned how to love himself—to exist independently, as his own person. He arrives at this place before his mother does. Though, of course, it is the stabilizing force of her love that guides him there.

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A child is the smallest figurine in the set of nesting dolls. A child is not hollow. A child is whole until a child is fed stories about who they are and how people see them. A child can remain whole or can lessen the void that may expand in their abdomen by experiencing love that is given fully, with no expectation of receiving something in return.

A child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child.

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At the novel’s climax, the husband speaks to the narrator in a distanced voice that sounds like he is “impersonating someone else.” As he watches her experience visible panic, he “wait[s] a moment—like an actor,” before saying: “Do you want me to call an ambulance? Do you want me to call 911? Do you want to go to the hospital? […] with a grotesque imitation kindness, like a cartoon witch offering […] a poison apple.” It is within this exchange that the narrator finally recognizes that her husband is hoping she’ll come apart—that he’ll be able to send her to a psychiatric institution to disappear, fulfilling the fantasy of her mental instability that he has invented. When she is shaken but refuses to succumb to his narrative, “he seem[s] confused, as if [she is] going off-script.” The performance of their marriage unravels.

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One morning, the child falls from his crib. He repeats the words “fah dunn” over and over again, reliving the trauma to try to make sense of it. The narrator walks the child through the happening, acknowledging the fall, then reminding him of his survival. Mother and child go over the story one time and then another and then another until the woman “turn[s] the open side of the bed to the wall and pray[s] he [doesn’t] try to stand up, slip between crib and wall, panic, and break his shins.” All of this happens while the husband is traveling. The next day, the husband returns and the narrator finds the child “sitting happily in his bed”—neither traumatized nor broken—and she declares herself “lucky […] to have such a happy family.”

Later, when the marriage has come undone, she realizes that “it wasn’t happiness; it was the temporary cessation of pain.” One mistakes the two when one cannot imagine a feeling more divine than numbness. When one has never truly felt joy or been properly cared for.

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“The most intimate relationship,” writes Manguso in the voice of her narrator,

is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child. The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body, the teaching how to lift food to the mouth, how to speak, how to show love according to the feeling of love, […] how to wipe one’s own tears.

The first time I read these words, I looked down at my child nursing in my arms, feeling the weight of his tiny body relying entirely on me, and thought: That is exactly what this is. Then I read Andrea Skinner’s account of sexual violation by her stepfather and her mother’s subsequent silencing and thought: This kind of love is a privilege—how can I make myself deserving of it?

After crafting a new narrative for her child, the woman in Liars writes a new story for herself. “I wanted my son to have a calm, capable mother,” she reflects. “I began to think of myself as capable, calm, and optimistic, and then I became that way. That was the order in which those things happened.” The woman turns herself into the type of mother she wants her child to have—the type of mother Andrea Skinner and all children deserve to have. This allows her to become a person who is not beholden to, much less defined by, another.

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The truth is that most children do not have this type of mother. Mothers fail their children every day, in immense and small ways. What Munro did is not unusual. She sacrificed her daughter for a narrative that was more comfortable to live within.

When I was pregnant, I told myself a story about how I would care for my body and my unborn child tenderly. How I would eat only fruits and vegetables and whole grains. How I would practice yoga and gentle daily exercise and deep breathing. I did none of those things. In early motherhood, I’ve had to sit with the uncomfortable truth that my wants did not dissipate when I became tasked with caring for a tiny human. To write this, I strapped my child to my chest and took long walks around our neighborhood while I narrated lines into my phone, hoping he would fall asleep so that I could keep writing. Which is an inherently selfish want. Even as my love for my child is total, animal, and all-consuming, that love has not made me any less flawed—as I had naively believed stepping into the role of mother would. Still, I will keep writing a story of a better mother. One day, I hope I will become her.