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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.

This is a searing account of a toxic marriage, told in the first person by a narrator whose survival mechanism is to tell herself stories that things aren't so bad between her and her infuriating husband.

They're both liars but while he lies from ego, from convenience, by entitlement, her lies are more self-protective, a way of accommodating herself to the fantasies that culture still propagates to women: that we need a husband to be happy, that fulfillment comes from motherhood, wifehood and domesticity, that creative and artistic endeavours are some kind of selfish indulgence and that any woman who doesn't know and conform willingly to all this is psychologically sick and deserves to be institutionalized as 'crazy'.

Manguso's prose is restrained but can be shining-sharp, and she writes this in broken up fragments, a little like journal entries, the form of a woman who cannot even find the time and space to prioritize her own thoughts and feelings.

There's nothing radical in the way this book attests to the continued hierarchy of men's needs over women's; the ongoing power dynamic that comes from their superior earning power not least in the face of maternity; the struggle to control the narrative and whose story comes out on top. But Manguso doesn't bypass the complicity of women and the deep-seated desire to conform to the romantic fantasies with which we have been socialized.

One of the clever things about the narrative is the way, as readers, we're almost invited to blame Jane: the red flags are so obvious, so frequent; her husband's contempt so blatant, his power plays of withholding so clear - but one of the provocations here is to make us consider our own complacency and complicity, to empathize rather than to look on and ask why Jane puts up with this and why she doesn't leave him.

The important thing is that this is a frequently told tale and one that goes back through history: whatever progress has been made, there are disturbing continuities in the lives of women and I could almost feel my blood pressure rising living vicariously through Jane's married life!

One to file alongside A Room of One’s Own and Rachel Cusk's Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.