Excerpt from Liars by Sarah Manguso, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Liars

In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.

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.

But before all that, back at the beginning, I remember looking out the door of my apartment, watching John's head appear as he climbed the stairs, and then, step by step, more and more of him. Which is when I said, You're real!

Which was my first mistake.

* * *

Upstate for the summer, I was house-sitting and making vigorous use of the fireplace. I walked by the Hudson and sometimes swam. The locals said that you could pick through the river bottom and find pure garnets, but I never found any, so I tried to write poems about not finding them.

I pretended that the house was mine, and that I'd paid it off and lived alone. I pretended I was fifty years old and had published many books translated into many languages. I imagined seducing the beautiful young men who installed satellite dishes and fixed cars and lived in my neighbors' converted stables.

The house didn't have a satellite dish, and the only theater in town screened Hollywood fluff that had played in the city months earlier, but in late June a film festival came to town.

The reception after opening night was the first party I'd attended in a long time, and I introduced myself to the Canadian filmmaker whose film had been my favorite. The action took place at the foot of a mountain over hundreds of years. The last shot was just the landscape. It was calm and forthright. It resembled him. His name was John.

He and I drank two drinks together, and then I followed him to his room in the inn, where I saw all the things he'd collected over his three days in town. Mugs with dried red wine at the bottom, or half an inch of milky old coffee. Overdue books from the New York Public Library, river stones, castoffs from a local flea market, and all the birch bark he'd found on the ground all week, apparently—it was everywhere. I hadn't picked up any of it. Because it was everywhere.

It was dark, and I was afraid of the dark—the real dark, the country dark. It isn't dark in the city even though we refer to dark alleys and dark nightclubs. Those are only city dark. In the country, under the right circumstances of moon and weather, the dark can be depthless. I had never seen this dark before, but John was from Alberta and didn't mind it. In fact he seemed to love it. I didn't hold his hand in the dark, that first night, but I took his arm, and he led me back to my little house in the night.

Over the next week he hand-delivered a birch-bark note to me in my mailbox every day, and halfway through that week we started f***ing and didn't stop for almost fifteen years.

I tried to understand that first ferocious hunger and couldn't. It came from somewhere beyond reason.

He had the calm, unguarded eyes of someone who had already seen everything. Those eyes, his heavy limbs, the raucous black bloom of pubic hair. He smelled like cedar. I asked him whether this happened to him often, because it hadn't ever happened to me. Not like this, he said.

He said that in the next two years he wanted to make a name for himself, put his finances in order, and find gallery representation for his photographs. I wanted to publish a book-length poem and get a tenure-track teaching job.

He wanted to win the Akadimía Prize, which would take him to Athens, Greece, for a year, to live in a beautiful villa and work in an airy studio and eat food prepared by chefs. He said that I should apply, too—every year the fellowships were given to two artists, two writers, two architects, two medievalists, and so on.

I felt dull when I remembered that John could write, draw, and make photographs and films, while I could only write. I wondered if I'd feel like a failure next to him. But then I remembered that he thought clearly, felt deeply, worked hard, made art, was dark and handsome, and wanted to marry me. I'd ordered à la carte and gotten everything I'd wanted.

Excerpted from Liars by Sarah Manguso. Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Manguso. Excerpted by permission of Hogarth Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.