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This is a serious and well-reviewed work of literary fiction that reads like an amalgamation of every half-insane 3am postpartum Facebook mom-group post (or any other platform on which a woman attached to a baby can make an account that reaches other women in other locations who are also attached to a baby). This book made me laugh out loud, and it’s not funny.
The plot is propulsive, making it easy to read in a sitting or an otherwise similarly condensed amount of time. But, what the fuck?

Liars is aptly titled � it is not very truthful or generous, its narrator unreliable and dishonest even with herself. The real question, for me, is: Is this on purpose?

This is the great example of contemporary white female literary novel. An almost infantile rebellion against the disappointment of life. Marriage becomes a convenient direction to aim one’s fears of human aging and the despair of living. The spouse conveniently becomes the source, explanation, and stand-in for all that is bad (for Daddy, for Mommy, for career misgivings, for financial struggle, for inadequacy and all faults and fears of the self). There’s a lack of nuance to this story; without nuance, we can identify and express all the conflicting, complicated feelings life induces in us as, simply, Anger.
Anger, anger, anger! Feminism has revealed this anger to us; its source, its power, and explores its outlets. But modern feminism has led us into anger’s cage and locked us in from the inside.
Yes, we are angry. Okay, our anger is righteous. But this not new or unknown. When do we begin to ask what’s next? Is oblivious toxic femininity our best response to its inverse?
When do we accept that pain and unfairness is not an exception to the rule but simply a feature of human existence, and then explore how to Be within that system, in a way that does little or no harm?
By allowing ourselves to perceive our spouse as a representation of an entire system (of which they are, like you, only a solitary pawn) as opposed to a flawed individual, we doom our relationship automatically with almost no effort. It is no way to participate in marriage or to measure its level of success.

The work of genius or brilliance here, to me, would be if this book subverted the idea that most readers/reviewers seem to have taken from it � if this is not actually a story about heterosexual marriage and the inevitable pitfalls of the patriarchy and the revolting entitlement of the handsome white man and the extinguishing of a delicate feminine flame. If this is, instead, a story about our response to the modern world, to boredom and feelings of ineffectuality and irrelevance � our modern expression and examination of existentialism. Our response to a society designed to make life hard; particularly for women, particularly for women artists, particularly for women artists who are mothers and financially dependent.

Or if this was a story that was not trying to say something about the institution of marriage itself, but instead an on-the-nose horror story about a shitty guy doing the worst a man can do in a marriage (short of physical assault or familicide) and his shitty-in-a-different-way wife.

This is a story about two people who, as people often and will always do, got married without considering the implications of such an act and who had little real regard for one another on an individual level � classic mistake. This is a story about two people who did not enter their relationship, or proceed in it, in good faith and tried to skate on that thin ice armed only with blame, pretending to not know that blame sinks.

This woman is reactive, resentful, and lacks self-perception. She does not handle many things in this book appropriately. Now, was she wronged? Yes. Did her feelings have validity? Also, yes. But isn’t part of our job, as mothers, or parents in general, to teach our children that our feelings having grounding does not validate bad behavior? As for the husband and his ever-lengthening failures and transgressions...this guy is A Bad Man incarnate. You imagine him with the cleft chin of a Disney villain.

The heroine fantasizes about murdering him. She considers women who have committed infanticide and suicide and wonders, harmlessly, what the men did to them, first, to provoke such a response. She waxes poetically about the beautiful story of the famously wronged Aileen Wuornos, another strong woman lost to the patriarchy.
One wonders if a man could harmlessly wonder what a woman could have done to drive a man to kill her and her children, or himself in front of her, or to beat her, or to rape her, or to brutalize her in any number and variety of ways � and have that harmless thought published?
It’s not that murder isn’t a compulsion that is interesting or worthy of exploration � rather that it could be interesting, and fruitful, in the right hands. In this book�

Is this the best we can do? After a past spent as fuck-holes with no rights, respect, or, as Austen wrote, prospects, do we now in turn refuse to see men as our multidimensional human equals?
Yes, we are no longer victims! Instead, we (women) are the perfectly manifested response to a belligerently, consciously, evilly oppressive offense (men) that is yet, concurrently, inferior in all possible ways� namely in areas relating to empathy, intellect, intelligence, and capability.

I don’t know � a bad marriage is ripe soil for a novel, but this feels like a study of caricatures. One comes to the novel to explore consciousness and its hidden secrets. You can go to reality TV for convenient caricatures and a comfortable view of out-of-control behavior.

I think this book wants to be about marriage as an entity but is, instead, about specific people, people who play out their roles in this narrative like characters in a horror movie. Each sentence on each cleanly-spaced, ingestible (dare I say, photogenic?) page makes you want to stand up and yell “No! Stop!� Every page designed to bring you along on a journey of mounting, explosive anxiety.
This is a serious novel and yet it left me feeling the way I do after finishing an Emily Henry � all of this could have been solved with a little more communication.