Not All Husbands

On Sarah Manguso’s ‘Liars’ and the Iterative Politics of Marriage

Pablo Picasso, Lovers of the Street, 1900, Pastel on paper

In Sarah Manguso’s 2024 novel Liars, the talented and tireless Jane — a writer and professor as well as a wife and mother — suffers physical, verbal, emotional, and financial abuse at the hands of her mediocre, professionally aimless, and mean-spirited husband, John. Despite John’s utter awfulness, which runs both wide and deep, Jane stays with him for about fifteen years, until he leaves her for another woman.

Liars is written in the first person with Jane as narrator, in the aftermath of her divorce from John. The book is elegant and incisive, the kind you devour in one sitting. It vibrates with Jane’s — and, by extension, Manguso’s — relentless, righteous anger.

But not at John, exactly.

One man, however villainous, is too narrow a focus for Manguso. This is systemic fury. After all, reflects Jane, in an attempt to justify staying with John for so long: “no married woman I knew was any better off.” And later, in surveying the ruins of her marriage: “maybe the trouble was just that men hate women.”

As a whole, Jane’s explanatory musings establish that Liars is not really about this man using and abusing this woman but about the ostensibly socially constructed nature of mistreatment of women by men — specifically, of wives by husbands. In the beginning of the novel, Jane synopsizes her story thus: “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.”

From this vantage point, the personal would be political if anything were personal in the first place. But there is only the political, which so engulfs and explains the personal that the novel becomes near-allegorical.

In Liars’ own self-conception, it is not so much an evocative, well-told, infuriating story of Jane’s terrible marriage — though it is that — but a mere example of how marriage itself is terrible. Because men hate women. Or, more accurately, husbands hate wives. Indeed, for Manguso, “wife” means not “female partner” but “subjugated partner” (almost all of whom are female) and husband means not “male partner” but “entitled subjugator” (almost all of whom are male).

In 2025, this kind of 1970s “battle of the sexes” rhetoric has been making a comeback. When I was in college in the 2000s, the satirical poem with a perennial spot on the Women’s Studies 101 syllabus, I Want a Wife (1971), felt — even to many self-professed feminists — rather dated and retrograde. But today, it somehow feels fresh again.

So, Liars is the novel for this moment — the longer story that compliments that viral TikTok video from Paige Connell, the “mom influencer” and mother of four who recently explained why she almost divorced her otherwise “amazing” husband because she felt he was not carrying his share of the “mental load,” leaving her “in charge of everyone and everything in the house.”

As a wife, mother, and writer myself, I have three seemingly conflicting — but, I hope, ultimately reconcilable — reactions to both Manguso’s novel and the au courant anti-marriage vibes to which it so eloquently gives voice.

The Mental Load of “Wife” and “Mother” Is Heavy

In the big ways that typically define one’s worldview, I am as unlike Jane as could be. She is a progressive artist, secular, and ambivalent about being a wife. She ties the knot in her mid-thirties, and only because she met an ostensibly feminist man who claims to share her androgynous, egalitarian view of marriage. I am a practicing Catholic, politically centrist, and temperamentally conservative. I got married at twenty-five to a fellow traditionalist who I met as an undergraduate at my secular university’s Catholic student center. When I was twenty-seven and he was twenty-nine, we had our first child, making us noticeable outliers among even Catholic, elite-educated East Coasters, let alone among our educational and geographical cohort writ large.

So, it is a testament to both the quality and the truth of Manguso’s prose that Jane’s low boil of constant frustration at her lot as the person, in Paige Connell’s words, “in charge of everyone and everything in this house,” is so relatable to me.

Like Connell, I have four children. And like Connell, I am the primary caregiver for those children such that all physical, educational, and logistical aspects of their lives, as well as all domestic tasks that keep our household running, are (unless explicitly delegated to and owned by my husband — more on this later) my responsibility.

This workload, the “mental load,” is indeed relentless. No, not because there is too much to do and not enough hours in the day — not exactly. In my mid-twenties, I spent two years in the adjunct jungle, working the equivalent of two-and-a-half full-time teaching jobs year-round, while also finishing my doctorate full-time at night. Immediately upon landing the non-tenure-track faculty position for which I had been gunning, I had two babies in less than two years while working a full-time job with less than half-time child care. I have a hearty constitution and I am used to doing well enough on not much sleep.

So, for me, it’s not so much the time that’s the problem. It is, at bottom, the inevitable, constant fracturing of any possibility for sustained concentration. That’s what produces the ceaseless irritation Manguso captures with such vividness.

Read school update. Drive to practice. Sign field trip permission slip. Register for camp. Sign test. Sign up for class party. Obtain costume. Make dentist appointment. Check in for pediatrician visit. Clean up milk spill. Host party. Buy groceries. Read email about costume day reschedule. Dust. Sort through more papers. Call electrician. Get birthday present for grandma. Reorganize closet. Sign up for another class party. Cook dinner. Drive to play date. Reorganize art supplies. Pick up from practice. Rearrange furniture. Get birthday present for preschool friend. Organize medicine cabinet. Get birthday present for tween friend. Pack lunches. Find keys. Make breakfasts. Vacuum. Replace batteries. Fold laundry. Find baseball socks. Buy cleats. Schedule, schedule, schedule.

Add dozens of daily text messages about all of the above and a domestic to-do list that never ends; multiply it all by four kids and one old house, in my case (or, one kid and a rotten husband, in Jane’s); and hit shuffle-play.

Now, try to be a writer.

I suspect that I would not have identified with Jane’s hum of baseline overwhelm or Connell’s resentment at the weight of domestic responsibility had I encountered Liars or that viral TikTok back when I worked in higher education full-time. I did my jobs well and thoroughly, and I was invested in aspects of them. Yet, I gave them little to no creative energy.

Which is exactly how I wanted it, and why I quite self-consciously chose to make my professional life a series of jobs rather than a career. My honorable toil would serve others and bring in necessary income. But my vision — and the vast majority of my working hours — would belong to my family.

Back then, I viewed women like Jane as having everything backwards. Babies come first, then books. I still believe this, at least for me.

Only, it never occurred to me that there might come a point when I would not need to work for our family’s base income. Now, thanks to the fruits of my husband’s professional ambition and weariless grind, I am fledgling in the “books” stage while I still have young children.

I have always been good at prioritizing what is important to me and shrugging off what isn’t. Case in point: For most of my marriage, there have been piles of clean, unfolded clothes from floor to nearly ceiling in our bedroom. But now, between the future adults I am working to raise, the organized home and vibrant community in which I wish to raise them, the self-driven writing I am eager to do, and the constant hustle involved in generating opportunities to do it, there is enough in the “important to me” column to occupy far more time and focus than I can muster on any given day. Something has to give, and that something is almost always my work.

When what’s on the other side is one of my actual children, that doesn’t bother me. I’ve made the choices I have because I want to be present for and with them, to shape them in accordance with the values my husband and I share.

But when what’s on the other side is one of the myriad administrative tasks that keeps life running . . . well, I confess to being not infrequently bothered. And enervated. And overwhelmed. This, not the children (and, in my case, not the husband), is what makes the mantle of what Jane would call wifehood — with its endless minutia and boring but crucial tasks — such an admitted burden.

Husbands Are (Mostly) Not the Problem

When my husband has an important meeting, he turns off his cell phone. If I needed to reach him in an emergency, I would have to call either his office or the restaurant where he’s hosting some big client. Meanwhile, since becoming a mother, I have never — literally not once, including while giving birth to my younger three children, while teaching, and while being live on podcasts — been unreachable.

My husband does not read emails from our kids’ school or sign permission slips or know when they have dentist appointments. He has to be told where the kids’ clothes are in their drawers, and these days he cooks pretty much solely when we’ve planned to barbeque. He cleans up from dinner and unloads the dishwasher only when I’m out for the night.

So, this is when I reveal that my marriage, like Jane’s, is a hopeless example of the patriarchal misogyny that Manguso takes aim at in Liars, right? Not so fast. In fact, there are two major problems with Manguso’s and Connell’s takes on domestic work within marriage.

First, we wives bring on a lot of this “mental load” ourselves by virtue of our own higher domestic standards. If I left household organization to my husband, for example, we would have more clutter. Not because he dislikes my aspirational minimalism (on the contrary, he appreciates it), but because he would not make that kind of household order a top priority. And you know what? Everyone would survive. Similarly, the refrigerator would not be as organized and the diaper bag would have fewer backup snacks. Life would go on.

Do I get annoyed when I leave my husband to do a given household task and see that it has not been done to my standards? I do. Would it be fair to blame that on internalized sexism? It would not.

On average, women and men are not the same, and no amount of pseudo-enlightened yammering about “socially constructed gender roles” (otherwise known as evidence of evolutionary biology) will make them so. Even the best dads usually won’t keep the pantry as tidy as their wives would like. Contra Manguso, this — not men’s hatred of women — is why mom usually organizes the pantry.

Which brings me to my second point: Husbands have mental loads, too. At least, ones like the man Connell considered divorcing (because he did not take out the trash one day but in her words, an “amazing” and “loyal” and “present” husband) do. Often, we wives get upset about feeling, per Connell, “unseen,” but simultaneously fail to see the things that our husbands do without any acknowledgment.

Here’s an incomplete list, for example, of familial imperatives of which I take little cognizance. Manage finances, take out trash, wash and dry clothes, store kids’ sports gear, take care of the lawn, lock up the house, attend to car maintenance, and troubleshoot issues with technology. My husband does these thankless tasks mostly without my help or knowledge, just as I do many similarly mundane chores mostly without his help or knowledge. Sometimes — like, when I fail to tell him that the oil light came on or that tomorrow is pajama day at school — he does them despite my active hindrance. This is in addition to being the family breadwinner, whose time is therefore, by definition, more valuable than mine.

My husband is virtually always — really, always — either actively working or actively parenting. Except, I guess, when he’s traveling for work, which he does with some regularity. So, I’m not about to give up the little time that we can carve out each week to spend with one another so that he can (incompetently, in my view) load the dishwasher.

Sure, I feel like I have no room to breathe and no time to spare. But one person I know has even less: the loving, generous, tireless man I had both the good sense and the good fortune to marry young.

The problem of overburdened wives like Jane and worthless husbands like John is systemic, alright, but not in the way Manguso thinks.

Most women living amidst the mainstream culture today do not value marriage enough to prioritize it as a cornerstone (rather than a capstone) of adulthood; nor do they have an accurate understanding of which virtues in a partner will actually make them happy in the long run. These are two reasons why marriage — along with, not incidentally, female happiness — is on the decline.

Lasting Romance Is Not Romantic

In the 1987 miniseries Anne of Green Gables, seventeen-year-old Anne is having trouble coming to terms with the impending nuptials of her best friend, Diana, who has accepted a marriage proposal from a local friend who Anne finds boring.

Lamenting this development with the fifty-something Marilla, Anne complains: “He certainly isn’t the wild, dashing young man Diana used to want to marry. Fred is . . . extremely good.” Marilla replies, “That is exactly what he should be. Would you want to marry a wicked man?” Anne, now pensive, offers this bemusing yet alarming answer: “Well, I wouldn’t marry anyone who was really wicked, but I think I’d like it if he could be wicked, and wouldn’t.” Marilla concludes their conversation with the only reply any right-thinking adult could offer: “You’ll have more sense someday, I hope.”

It takes Anne a while to gain that sense. But, by her early twenties, she does — ultimately rejecting a proposal from the dark, handsome, and melancholy man of her girlish dreams to marry a local friend of her own.

How does Manguso’s Jane, by contrast, wind up in her mid-thirties, marrying a guy who really is wicked?

Well, Jane came of age in an era of postmodern relativism, in which concepts like good and evil are supposed to be in the eye of the beholder. There is no one to tell her (and she has not been formed with a reality principle sufficient to tell herself) that thirty-something men who list themselves as single online while dating you, get drunk with their graduate students, brood with jealousy over your professional successes, take eight thousand dollars without paying it back, and don’t propose when they say they will are not good prospects for marriage. Even if you love how they look. No matter how they make you feel. And even if they call themselves feminists.

Maybe especially if they call themselves feminists.

Writing in The Atlantic in February, Jill Filopovic draws a contrast between what she calls the “traditional model” of masculinity and the “masculinity of MAGA.” In the traditional model, she argues: “real men are expected to provide for themselves and their families, protect those they love, and demonstrate the kind of moral fortitude that justifies their familial and social authority.” She goes on: “There are all kinds of problems with this traditional model, and feminists like me are among the first to point them out. The masculinity of MAGA, though, is far worse: It rejects commitment and virtue, but still demands power and respect.”

Filopovic is right that the masculinity of MAGA is entitled and vile. She is wrong about why.

It is precisely the rejection of the traditional model — of the prevailing cultural expectation that good men provide (no, not necessarily as sole or primary breadwinners) and protect (yes, physically as well as emotionally) within a universally understood moral framework (yes, one that valorizes the long and faithful marriage) — that produces and enables MAGA’s empty bravado, on the one hand, and John’s faux-egalitarianism, on the other.

In a culture that held men to the standard of responsible adulthood — that is, to the living out of the universal, Tocquevillian virtues as most usefully manifested by males — both President Trump and Manguso’s John would spectacularly fail the test of respectable manhood.

The traditional model was not a less-than-enlightened pit stop on the way to some androgynous utopia that we should keep trying in vain to reach. It was the bulwark against pagan nature, which is resurging in its absence. Including among those like John. Who are most attractive to women like Jane, who claim not to believe that nature as such even exists.

So, the problem is not traditional masculinity as manifested by husbands. After all, if Jane had married someone who embodied that — well, she’d still be married.

Maybe even happily.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is based in Philadelphia, PA. She writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.