When You're Somebody's Wife, You're Somebody's Wife
The average comes for everyone
The protagonist of Sarah Manguso’s latest, Liars, released yesterday in the U.S., is in a terrible marriage. Her husband, a serial liar and manipulator, doesn’t value either the work she does as a writer or the work she does as a wife and mother. She really ought to get a divorce, before it’s too late.
But of course, by then, it’s already too late. She doesn’t hear the reader clamoring for her to take a swift exit. She’s too convinced she can last it out, that she can make it work, that she can contort herself in any direction in order to fix the broken relationship or change the broken man.
She, after all, is a promising career woman. She writes, she publishes, she lands teaching jobs wherever they suddenly move (thanks to her husband’s mercurial career). And then, of course, there is her pride. Being a wife, she says, wasn’t something she particularly wanted to do, but “I knew I’d be very good at it.” Turns out, that counts for a lot.
Of course, this is a novel, so “too late” is an inevitability, with the marriage souring beyond recognition — an outcome so obvious that the reader senses it from the first few pages. But that part of the story is sort of beside the point. It’s the horror of how the narrator gets so deep that makes this novel — this plunge down the rabbit hole toward certain demise — so simultaneously terrifying and upsetting.
She casts, over and over again, the role of “wife” as a costume she is wearing and marvels that no one knows she’s pretending. She was just going along with things, for a while — like giving up full-time work to take care of their child, like caring for their cat and taking care of the house and planning meals and tending to all the various expected and unexpected needs of those who rely on her, day in and day out, leaving her next to no time to work on her craft. That wasn’t who she was, she was not really somebody’s wife, in the epithetical way Manguso uses the term in the novel.
And yet, the rules still apply:
All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do, after all our education, after having been told that we’d be able to do anything, after having children in America. We’d all assumed we’d continue our lives as before, and that the only difference would be a child or children silently napping in bassinets or playing with toys while we worked. We hadn’t known we’d be holding grimly on to screaming, incontinent, vomitous creature twenty hours a day.
Because that’s the propulsive horror of a story like this — a story that does feel like it is grinding an axe while also confessing to… something. It’s the familiarity. It’s the way that middle-to-lower-class stay-at-home-mothering does not discriminate against whether your partner is supportive, involved, or emotionally available. The average, or the common denominator, still includes you. The wage gap, the invisible labor, the default parenting. And if it’s not you, it’s a mother that you know, whether she’s told you or not. The familiarity of the protagonist’s rage, and her helplessness in the face of it, is a slow-motion car crash. You know what’s going to happen, sort of. You stay for the particulars; you stay to see how she figures it out.
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Quick syllabus-writing update
Here is a 2010 Emily Witt essay from n+1 that I teach every chance I get, because it was taught to me and I am better for it. It’s called Miami Party Boom, and it is many things, among them a great example of fragmented essay writing (which my more advanced creative students ask about a lot), narrating the changing of one’s mind, and also, again, that spare reportorial approach that conveys big emotions by avoiding sensationalism. It’s also, now, a time capsule. Come for the aughts celebrity cameos, stay for Witt’s insanely weird character writing.
In other news!
One week left to order TV Summer: GIRLHOOD! Pre-orders are discounted to $10 until Aug. 1, the day I (Monica) plan to send them to the printer. These are made to order with very few extras tacked on to the first printing.
TV’s print quarterly (which goes with the web drop) exists for two reasons: One, because there’s something beautiful about making hardcopy art-artifacts in the year of our lord 2024. It’s exciting to have and to hold, to get in the mail, to physically share with others. Also, it looks cool lying around (take it from me). But secondly, it’s an effort to bring income into the greater TV operation. It helps allow me to pay writers, which I would like to continue. It helps me pay writers WHILE paying for the website, which both our writers and our readers appreciate. I take zero of these dollars because TV is a labor of love and I believe in investing everything we sell back into the machine.
The same is true of our paid Substack subscribers, by the way, for whom I am currently contemplating worthy perks. (Author interviews, anyone? Maybe? Please let me know, I am actively soliciting input into what makes upgrading to paid worth it for you, as much as I appreciate your being a down-ass patron of the arts.)
I will continue making a print edition for as long as it remains a financially solvent endeavor. If that tapers off, printing will unfortunately reduce. If you want to help keep us going, I would greatly appreciate it. :)
Anyway, that’s my pitch, here’s the summer cover again, and I’ll see you next time.
xoxo
Monica