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.