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Is divorce the new marriage plot?
InSarah Mangusos latest novel,Liars, Jane meets John.
She is a writer, he is an artist, both with serious ambitions.
They marry, have a child.
Sarah Manguso
But while Janes writing career succeeds, Johns artistic dreams fizzle.
The unraveling of their marriage, and their subsequent divorce, is the plot ofLiars.
The novel pulses with a rare kind of anger, making it a compulsive, unforgettable read.
Love stories, it seems, are out.
And model and writerEmily Ratajkowskirevealed what she callsher divorce ringlast year.
With me as their lucky moderator, they discussed their own experiences and the ideas presented inLiars.
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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.
Ive been keeping a voluminous diary for almost 30 years.
When I got divorced very suddenly during COVID, it was inevitable that I would write about it.
Making lunch for your child.
I personally had a very vague sense of what a marriage ought to ideally be.
Does wifehood pose a larger threat to being an artist than motherhood?
For the most part, she could convince herself that she was.
She is absolutely in thrall to a mans ego.
Ratajkowski:I felt marriage was a romantic thing.
I thought that it would ultimately be a partnership.
Let me show you how I got this ring.
After having a child I found myself accepting what was happening.
Im 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.
Im so hungry for insight into that arrangement.
Ratajkowski:I have a really complicated relationship with powerful men.
I certainly didnt want someone who needed me to feel small.
I have often attracted men who like big personalities.
I really wanted to believe that we were past that.
But these inequalities have also become more covert.
What kind of damage triggers when a woman is called crazy by her partner?
Manguso:I hesitate to drag in the 10,000 examples from current events, fromAmber HeardtoGabby Petito.
Its this archetypal story that women go crazy and their long-suffering husbands just dont know where it came from.
Jane knows it doesnt look good.
Shes raging and yelling and sobbing in the mediation meetings.
Shes fantasizing about smearing shit on Johns canvases.
It was really important to me to represent infidelity as an absolutely reality-wrecking, sanity-destroying, destabilizing experience.
Im a white, young woman with a decent amount of money.
But I had to really watch my behavior and control my responses.
Im still actually reeling from that.
Making people question their reality is a fundamental pillar of abuse, physical or emotional.
We dont spend enough time talking about that.
And then you discover that you are not.
There are strange, cemented ideas around what things touch a child.
A lot of them are about how the mother reacts to behavior that is totally unacceptable from a man.
It falls to the mother not only to endure this behavior but also to keep her child from it.
I eventually found that if I demonstrate self-respect, my child is likely to have self-respect.
Manguso:Absolutely, yes.
It wasnt until afterward that I began to shed this cultural baggage that Id been carrying.
Beliefs like,Cheating is cool.
Its a sexy hobby for sophisticated French people.
Ratajkowski:Youre a prude.
Throughout the novel, red flags keep popping up.
I kept wanting to whisper, Jane, get out of here.
If I had readLiarsthen, I wonder if I would have left sooner.
Manguso:Thesunk-cost fallacyis so seductive, isnt it?
Jane refers to her 10-year anniversary as a grand achievement.
Shes so proud of herself because, like everything in America, its no pain, no gain.
If youre making progress, its supposed to feel bad.
Shes applied this to a relationship with this person who is slowly destroying her.
I now see the celebration of anniversaries as culturally suspect.
Im grateful to be divorced.
Ratajkowski:There is a lot of talk about men, cheaters, lying.
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.
I believe in the female instinct and have witnessed its silencing.
Decentralizing men has been a huge part of my life.
Its opened so much space up in my life in so many incredible ways.
Manguso:I see now that there are many kinds of love.
My female friendships occupy more space in my life now.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
