My God, I Was Never Going To Be A Mother

A Conversation with Sarah Manguso

The world tells us lots of stories about what having kids will do to our bodies and our brains and our ability to write but lately I’ve been interested in the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about parenting and writing, family and ambition. Of course, it’s impossible to fully disentangle one from the other but I guess I’m thinking of the kinds of stories that feel like justifications or willful misbelief. For example, when I decided to have a fourth child, the story I told myself was that I was already in so deep and life had descended so permanently into chaos that one more wouldn’t make much of a difference.

This was predictably, even demonstrably, false but I kept telling it. Then, a month ago, two of my kids went away to camp. This meant a 50% reduction in the number of people saying Mom. Mom? Mom! It also meant fewer lunches to make and less laundry to do; weekend activities could be geared specifically toward the remaining team members and were met with enthusiasm rather than resistance. It was like someone had adjusted a pressure valve I don’t have access to and everything just felt…easier, more doable.

It had been a protective kind of story, the once you have a certain number it doesn’t really matter, and in certain ways it remains true, but not in all the ways, or even most of them. It was a story I told myself to get where I wanted to go but I probably need a new one, or at least a more nuanced one.

While my kids were away, I had the absolute pleasure of talking to Sarah Manguso about her incendiary ninth(!) book, Liars, a novel about what marriage can do to a woman, and the stories people tell themselves and others about their lives.

In real life, Sarah spent many years telling herself a story about what it would mean to become a mother – that it would turn her into a woman, something she never thought she was or intended to be, and that it was the kind of transformation that would destroy her ability to make art. Not all of the stories we tell ourselves are lies, but it takes time to figure out how true they are. Read on for our conversation about choosing to write Liars as fiction, the failures of Gen X men, and what being a mother and a wife did to her writing.  

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Liars is your ninth book, which is pretty astounding.

I am old. I have good skin, so it seems maybe astounding, but it's not that astounding. I think I threw that ninth book thing into the marketing material because I wanted to say, this is my ninth book, but it's the first book I've written as a single woman, and the experience of writing it was different. Of course, how could it not be? But nevertheless, I was surprised by how easy it was to write and by how free I felt.

Yeah, I want to ask about that feeling as it relates to form. You write across multiple genres. Your last two books — Liars and Very Cold People — are novels but before that, you had mostly written poetry and nonfiction. And you've spoken about how you never intended to write fiction before.

Oh, yeah, it took me absolutely by surprise. I felt very bashful when I was promoting my previous novel, which I published after swearing up and down for years that I would never write a novel. My lovely novelist friends always said, ‘oh, you have to.’ And I'm like, ‘no, I have no idea how, and nonfiction is great. Please don't make me have to write a novel.’ And so, for years I was able to resist and then it became clear to me that I needed to write about my childhood. And so of course, you know, write about it autobiographically. It's mine, it's my childhood. What's more autobiographical than writing about all the things that happened to you a long time ago? And because of- I don't know, I think the subject matter itself didn't lend itself very well to autobiography because I was writing about growing up in New England, which is a silent place full of secrets, and everything just felt so muted and partial and missing that I couldn't do it. And I realized that was the reason that I've never really been able to write about my childhood or about Massachusetts. And so I had to appeal to this new form, the novel. And I think that first novel carries a lot of the marks of a first novel. I think betrays some of the lessons I learned with difficulty in writing my first novel.

What would you say those were?

I think it adheres to conventions a little bit more than at least my later nonfiction books where I felt free to just kind of let the writing happen. But I did have some anxiety about writing a novel because I'm not really a long form writer. And I don't think in story, I don't think in arcs. I think in moments. And I knew that without the central coherence of a person writing about herself, I would have to attend to the story in a way that felt more difficult and new to me than writing my previous books had been. Anyway, that's all to say that my first novel felt like a first novel, but writing Liars just felt like, oh, I'm writing. I'm doing the thing that I know how to do.

Dd you go into it thinking this is going to be a novel?

Yeah, I did. I did. I wasn't altogether in my right mind. I began writing Liars about three or four days after my ex-husband walked out on me, and it was just this wonderful instinctual calling to write. And I'm constantly writing, I have a diary/notebook, I don't even know what to call it anymore, and writing is how I make sense of everything that happens to me. But this really felt like- every now and then you realize you've started a new project and it's that sort of excitement that like- oh, this is beginning. Yes, this is a beginning and one hopes that I'll arrive at the end and then it'll be a thing. So I did have that same feeling that this was the beginning of something.

I’m wondering about the decision to write it as fiction because, as you just alluded to, the line here between nonfiction and fiction is thin.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely true that I don't hide these facts about my personal life. I was in a long marriage, I was divorced, there was infidelity. These are all things that my son knows and he has processed and part of the impulse to write fiction- and I'm so glad I had already written a novel and didn't have to figure out how to write a novel with this material, but part of it was just wanting to spare my kid knowing any more details than he already knew about what had happened to his family. And I knew I needed to be absolutely free. And so I needed this- it really felt like a container. I needed this character, Jane. I needed her to be able to enact the anger that I could not, in ways that I could not, and I needed her. I mean, I kind of imagined her as being more free than I felt, and that was just what felt good and right at the time.

Yeah, I'm interested in the autofiction of it all. Everyone's constantly invoking that term and everybody understands it in different ways and so I'm wondering how you understand it as a genre and whether you think of this book as falling under it and whether that's helpful at all, or is it just like, this is a novel, it helped you write with freedom.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. As for the autofiction question, my good friend Sheila Heti figured it out for me. We were talking about it or texting about it, and she said, it's all autofiction. All fiction is autofiction. You're writing from a human subjectivity and your experiences and thoughts are going to find their way into the book. It don't matter if the character is exactly like you, it could be anyone, as long as you're breathing life into these human or whatever, they don't have to be human, but into these characters, it's autofiction. Please let's stop making these artificial categories in order to- I think it almost goes without saying that autofiction is often trotted out to minimize or take the writing of women and describe it in a way that makes it sound less literary, less worthwhile, less highbrow, less valuable.

Yeah, just copy pasted from life.

Oh, I know. ‘Isn't that just your diary?’ Even if it were, and I'm loosely quoting Sally Rooney, who also has a really intelligent answer to this question, even if I did cut and paste it from my diary, which I did not, I still had to write the fucking diary. I mean, it's still literature.

Fragmentation is another thing that you’ve used to great effect throughout your writing career and it’s also a style that’s often talked about as feminine and wielded as a kind of accusation against women. So I'm wondering what that compactness and the white space do for you and your writing in general, and particularly in this book?

You're so right that the word fragment is used to sort of minimize the- it's like, look, it's so short, it must've been so much easier to write. To quote Charles Baxter, he said, no one ever accused the great Haiku poets of short attention spans, they're just writing in smaller forms. And I'm grouchy enough that I don't even like the term fragment because it suggests that they're broken pieces and the compositional units in Liars aren't broken, they're just short. And you're right, they do kind of characterize all the prose writing I've really ever done and it's because I like doing it that way. I enjoy it, it feels like a puzzle, and I love puzzles. To try to distill something until it can be made no smaller without losing something essential about itself. I don't really think the compositional unit of Liars is functioning that differently from those of my other books. They're longer than the units I used in books like Ongoingness or 300 Arguments, which are very short nonfiction books but, yeah, I have an abiding interest. It's one of my preoccupations. I just really, really love making things compact, efficient to create effect with very few marks on the page or words in the doc.

I really admire that efficiency and as I read the book, I found myself copying certain lines or sections into a Word document until it was kind of like a commonplace book of Sarah Manguso language grenades. And then it was really interesting to look at them at the end and see what I had gathered.

Did you notice any themes?

I think you have this ability in this book to zero in on aspects of marriage that nobody talks about but are so common. I'm thinking, for example, of the narrator’s description of how, “after every quarrel, we then examined and speculated on our friends' relationships describing lovingly to each other their myriad flaws.” And that is something that is so common to marriages, I think, where we're-

All collecting data and analyzing it.

Constantly collecting data and using other marriages as measuring sticks.

At least it's not that bad.

And also the way in which bad marriages can be a catalyst for intimacy in your own.

I mean, you're putting your finger on something that is one of the essential projects of the book, which is just the function of the detail. So you're noticing John and Jane evaluating the details of their friends' marriages. But the way that Jane tells the story of her own marriage is in a panoply of detail. And I really needed to pack this book with details because people love talking about marriage in the abstract. They love saying that marriage takes work, and all over the world, domestic abuse victims are thinking, ‘wow, I guess this is just the work that I'm supposed to be doing.’ And when we don't talk about what constitutes reasonable relationship work on a granular level, we enable abuse because it's the critical mass of details that makes John's abuse of Jane impossible to deny. But I felt that I needed to pile up everything that Jane piles up in order for a reader to come to the conclusion that is the correct one, which is that you could even take three or four data points of this marriage and think, yeah, maybe there's a pattern of bad acting on the part of John, but there are these other three good ones. And it's really hard to- well, it would've been much more difficult for me to draw a conclusion about a 14-year relationship had I not had this mountain of data, because otherwise, it is just so easy to get lost in the abstractions. And depending on how you feel on that day, you could say, this marriage is bad, this marriage is good. And I believe that traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm, and that all marriages, especially marriages between cishet people, skew traditional, unless you're doing a superhuman amount of work to bend things the other way.

There’s that line in the book, I'm paraphrasing, probably badly, ‘no one should become a wife if she can help it, but nobody can help it.’

Nobody can help it.

I'm interested in how you see that pull, because again, with all the data, you look at that and say, why would you do it? This Jane in particular, and many people, many women, why do this?

Yeah, I have thoughts about that for sure. The biggest liar in the book is not John who's a cheater, or his affair partner. It's Jane who's a victim of her own self deception. And this book doesn't share a ton about its time and place, but it really is a book that takes place in a particular time and place. And I wanted Jane to be recognizable as a Gen X woman married to a Gen X man, and it's an apparently progressive marriage between two emerging artists at the beginning. It's a partnership between equals. It's not yet a legal marriage, and there isn't yet offspring. And it just very gradually turns into this domestic abuse scenario. Women of my generation, Gen X women, were sold a bill of goods for a new kind of heterosexual partnership that for most of us never actually materialized because I think a lot of Gen X women went into marriage thinking, we did it. I can open a bank account, I can get a graduate degree, I can get an abortion (oops, not anymore). I can do all of these things. I can have my own money, I can have my own education. So certainly this apparent equality in the social sphere should automatically translate into equality in the domestic sphere.

The men had not gotten that memo.

Gen X men did not get that memo. Gen X women really wanted to believe it though. And I certainly was a victim of my own self-deception in my marriage. I've had some interviews with people who did quite a bit of internet sleuthing and found, yeah, the broad strokes of the basic facts of Jane's marriage are somewhat similar to the basic facts of my marriage and divorce. But Jane is every woman, Jane is the Gen X hetero woman who really wanted so much to think that the revolution had reached the men too. It did not.

As I was reading Liars, I kept wondering to what degree the book thinks the problem of being a wife overlaps with the problem of being a mother. I never felt like I was a wife, so to speak, until I became a mother, if that makes sense.

I never knew I was a woman until I became a mother.

Right, I’m interested in those shifts. When I say wife- your narrator calls it a “real wife” and that distinction is interesting to me because it implies that you can be a wife without being a real wife. And so for me, once I became a mother, all of a sudden, my husband leaving the house meant being abandoned to labor rather than being alone, which I actually enjoy, like most writers probably. And one of my favorite lines in the book, which I'm always quoting at people now when they haven't asked for it is: “I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.” And when I quote it at people they're like, ‘oh my God.’

That's American het-norm motherhood.

Yeah, they're all mothers. But I guess I'm wondering to what degree you think that's true just of wives or if wife in this sense is coterminous with mother?

I don't think wife is coterminous with mother. Although, I mean, certainly I really welcome conversations with women younger than I who are in similar or different scenarios in their actual lives. The thing about motherhood is that it can exist wholly free of patriarchy, which is why patriarchy wants so much to conscribe it to wifehood.

So the problem of being a wife begins before you become a mother?

I think it can. For Jane, it doesn't really until she's pregnant, and then she realizes that she has been sort of just morphed- by the force of John's ego and his ham-handed gaslighting, she's been converted from a woman artist to a mediocre man's bang maid. So now just taking a step back, speaking for myself alone, it isn't really motherhood that I ever felt threatened my writing life. I had a lot of anxiety about becoming a mother before I became a mother because I had this heavily culturally programmed message that if I became a mother, I wouldn't be an artist anymore. I'm happy to report that that is absolutely ridiculous. Becoming a mother made me a better artist. It taught me to think about interesting things that I hadn't thought about before. And that's good. That's good for my writing. But what I never saw coming is that the real threat to my work came from being a wife. And like you, I was ever expecting to be a wife, but being a mother really underscored the fact that I was no longer in an equal partnership. I was a man's wife. I'm now divorced, and there are almost- even though I am much poorer materially, I don't feel like my writing life is threatened, even though I'm busier with things than I was when I was married. At least I'm not busy being a wife.

Right, so just practically, logistically speaking, how has your writing life changed? Your son is older now.

The big game changer, and this was told to me by divorced woman, artist friends before I saw my divorce coming, they said 50-50 custody really gives you a whole lot of time. I mean, I have a friend who bought a little bit of land in Topanga, parked an Airstream there, and now spends half of her time writing there, and others really touted it. Lyz Lenz has a fantastic essay about how 50-50 custody is something that could save many marriages because it sets up a framework that does not destroy women in the way that conventional marriage is designed to do. So going back to that line that you quoted, back when I was a wife, I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing. So virtually all of my time was spent just trying to keep all of the plates in the air for me, my kid, and my spouse. And now my kid is old enough to advocate for himself, so I feel okay letting him go to his father's house. And I have two five-day weekends- I mean, they're working, it's not really a weekend, but I'll say I have two five day stretches per month without any childcare responsibilities.

That's precious time.

It's precious time, and it's just a different kind of time from the time that I had when I was married, because even if the kid was at school, at camp, at a friend's house, the bottom line was always, if something happens, I'm on call. So there's this vigilance that you maintain and that I didn't know I was really maintaining until I didn't have to maintain it anymore. And it's been really valuable to getting back to working like a man can work.

Speaking of working like a man versus like a mother, I am kind of obsessed with your conversation many, many years ago with the poet Rachel Zucker.

Oh, yes. I love that conversation

This was from before you became a parent and, honestly, I could spend this entire interview talking to you about that conversation.

She had three kids at the time, and I had no kids, and I was unmarried, and she was married, and now we're both divorced.

In that conversation you told Rachel that you once declined an invitation to write something for an anthology of women's writing because citing Cynthia Ozick, you didn't consider yourself a woman writer.

Yeah, I didn't. There are definitely points on which I heartily disagree with Cynthia Ozick, but not that one. Sara, I didn't know I was a woman yet because I felt myself occupying a space in the greater social world, the cultural world, that it looked to me like the same space that men were occupying. But Rachel as a wife and mother of three at that point knew she was a woman. And all that I could see in confessing to being a woman was ghettoization. I didn't want to be ghettoized. I didn't identify with women, I identified with men. I certainly didn't identify with mothers. My god, I was never going to be a mother. I had no intention of ever becoming a mother because I was sensitized to this idea that there is such a thing as a woman and-

And you would become a woman by becoming a mother?

Yeah, I was completely wrong, but I was fixated on this idea that if you become a mother, then you would have to be a woman. You would have to occupy the ghetto that I so wanted to stay out of. I had no idea that it was not motherhood that would ghettoize me in a way that I would feel to be self-limiting, that I would feel to be a constraint on my writing self, on my career, on everything that I valued and value. I had no idea that what I should have really been fearing was wifehood, not motherhood but we didn't get into that in that conversation. I think Rachel probably knew quite a bit more about it than I did at that point, but it had never even occurred to me. I really thought that, again, well, we're just partners, we are in equal partnerships now. And I saw motherhood being the reason that Rachel couldn't do all of the career things that I felt were so important to me at the time.

But instead it was wifehood. You became a woman when you became a wife and even if you had not had a child, that would've been this kind of defining experience.

I think what we're getting at is the surprise that you and I shared when we realized that even after everything, even after all of these ideas that we had about ourselves and our work, we had to be traditional wives. Even after carefully selecting a mate who was overtly feminist and not overtly looking for somebody to just be the wife accessory. I thought I did such a good job, but the fact is that I wasn't prepared for how easy- I should say Jane, really. Jane is the one who exemplifies this much better than I did in my personal life. I had more freedom than Jane did in the beginning, though not that much more freedom than Jane had toward the end. It just came as such a surprise that after I had the kid, it really was all on me. And much has been written about the fact that this country does not have the social support that other developed countries have to support women and families, mothers and children. And yeah, I feel that the defining experience of motherhood is just recognizing that you've immediately become a second class citizen. You've been one all along. But again, for these progressive Gen X women- Jane really had no idea until she was forced to be a man's wife.

Your book is publishing after a bunch of popular and highly praised divorce memoirs by Maggie Smith and Lyz Lenz and Leslie Jameson and all of those books had as one of their central concerns that tension between being a wife and having ambition. So I'm wondering if that's kind of how you see your book. Is that kind of the central problem, or is that just a symptom and is there a more universal problem with being a wife beyond two people trying to make art, or one person trying to make art and the other one just wants her to be in charge of the domestic realm?

Well, yeah, writing about the problem of not just an ambitious woman, but a successful woman being with a less successful man. Not an utter failure of a man, I mean, he's not always unemployed, he's not always sort of trying to clean up the financial mess of his previous life. But it's a book about infidelity, where infidelity comes from. It's the more insecure person in the marriage worrying that the less insecure person in the marriage might abandon him. So he gets a little power by engaging in this life of deception. But no, to return to your question about the problem of the ambitious woman in the cishet relationship, I just did a wonderful interview with none other than Lyz Lenz and we talked about this very thing. This is something she writes about frequently, not just about her own marriage, but about her dating life after marriage. I love hearing women talk about this because I think we're all dancing around an idea that’s so off-putting and so ugly it's difficult to articulate, but I think on a very heavily programmed subconscious level, I think men are just discouraged from considering women as human as they are. There's just so much overt and covert messaging, especially men of my age. They've collected just so much cultural messaging indicating to them that they are real and that women are here to serve them. I just think it would take a monumental effort to disabuse themselves of all of those beliefs.

You’re talking about this as a Gen X phenomenon and I'm wondering to what extent that’s true. I’d love to believe that-

Younger men are different.

Because if you think about it objectively, it's kind of outrageous to believe that after thousands of years of things being one way and generations of cultural messaging reinforced, of course, by religion and every social structure we've ever built, that all of a sudden it would be fixed, in one generation.

Vivian Gornick so beautifully says it: it's impossible to erase the emotional habits of millennia in a single generation. And I think the average, so-called progressive Gen X man is more progressive than the average silent generation man, which is the generation that my father belongs to. And yeah, I think Gen Z men are different. In my cursory research, I think men born after say 1990 have absorbed a lot less misogyny than men of previous generations, and I would love to believe that that progress will continue, but with the rise of global fascism and all of the things that follow from that, I'm not expecting much good. I would love for this trend of progress to continue, but I'm just a novelist. I'm not the person who can make any kind of prediction.

Speaking of time and change, I’m thinking back to Ongoingness, which is your book on keeping a diary for decades, and really the crux of that book is how having a child changed your relationship to the diary. It lost its pull on you. I think the line was something like ‘he needed me more than I needed to write about him.’

You just reminded me of a short passage from that book that I think summarizes relatively accurately what that book was trying to do. One of the things that I was writing about was this realization, and this is the quote: “With my son, I was no longer just a thing living in the world, I was a world.” I was the background of his life, and I had never been anybody's background before.

Yes, I just love that line because over the years when I was first having kids, I would say that felt like a location more than a person. And that changes as they get older. Right now I kind of have both. My oldest is 12 and my youngest is three, so I see how it changes but I love that line and I guess my question is how has that being a world impacted your writing life over the years? I assume some of the passages in Liars, the ones that felt very familiar to me, like not being able to write when he's home sick from school, were drawn from life.

There's poop, vomiting. Poop take precedence over writing, of course. But I think you're not asking about the material changes that take place, because obviously, yeah, there's less time.

Yeah, I’m clear on the logistics.

It sounds like you're asking about the metaphysical changes that took place,

Yeah, that whole ‘I am trying to do this, when I could be doing that,’ and I would imagine that's something else that joint custody takes away from you, in a good way, because you don't have a choice. So it's not, ‘I'm giving this up for that.’

Especially when they're young, it's true. It is easier in many ways when they're older, as you know, but it still doesn't completely eliminate the regret or the- I hesitate to call it guilt, but the regret that I feel. There's one week when I'm going to be doing three events – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – and two of those are on my custody night and I feel terrible about it, but- no, I think that's just the end of the sentence. I feel terrible about it. And yet, I have to do both. I can't just be a mom. I have to be a writer.

Right, the diary lost its pull on you, but the rest of your writing life obviously did not. You have written a number of books since he was born.

I think I might have a useful answer to this. So the last book I wrote before I had my son was The Guardians, and that was an autobiographical essay about the suicide of one of my friends. It came out when my son was 27 days old. Then I published another couple of books and they were very short nonfiction books – Ongoingness that we've been talking about and 300 Arguments, which is even shorter than Ongoingness, like 8,500 words.

I think of that as your native form.

I know, but is it? Now, I don't know. The last book that I wrote partly during my marriage was my first novel, which is my longest book, and the first book I’ve started and finished since my divorce is Liars and it is even longer than Very Cold People. So did being a mother and wife make my books shorter? I would have fought this tooth and nail if you had asked me on tour for Ongoingness or 300 Arguments. I didn't want to confess that. I didn't want to know, as Jane doesn't want to know that her marriage is reducing her humanity. It's reducing the parts of her that are not a wife. Yes, my marriage made my books shorter, and it made my work smaller. Never again.

Can I just push back on that? Because those books that are important to people, they’re books that did something.

Yeah, they're not bad, but they're not the great project that I am capable of now. And I take great to mean broad and large and ambitious. They're smaller books.

At the end of Liars, Jane is watching her son climb a tree and she thinks, “My marriage is done. The last artifact of it is in the tree now. I feel like myself.” Do you think of those bookends, the before and the after books and whatever books are still to come as more your essential self? Do you feel like yourself in those books?

I won't say I feel more like myself, but I definitely feel more free now as a writer, more free than I did while I was a wife.

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