When a Woman Turns into a Wife: Jenessa Abrams reviews Sarah Manguso’s “Liars” in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s revelation about her sexual abuse and her mother Alice Munro’s silence. (Jenessa Abrams, July 23, 2024, LA Review of Books)
I sent a different version of this piece to my editor days before Skinner published her devastating and poignant essay about the abuse in the Toronto Star. When I wrote that first version, the connection between Munro and her work felt straightforward. So did the connection between “Too Much Happiness” and the book I’d set out to review: Sarah Manguso’s sophomore novel, Liars (2024). Both stories confront the impossibility of marriage for women who long for an identity outside of it. For women who wear the title of wife as a shackle. For women whose husbands view their independence as a threat. For women whose husbands need to be held and coddled.
As the world now knows, Munro chose to stay married after learning about her husband’s sexual violence. She rejected her then nine-year-old daughter’s innocence and blamed her as an adulterer. Where does one go from here? A wife learns of her husband’s evil and chooses him anyway. The evil is done to her child. The wife is a woman is an author is a mother. The child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child.
This piece was never meant to be about Munro. It was meant to be about Liars and women who are erased by men—as, for many years, was the fate of the fictionalized Sofya Kovalevskaya and the silenced Andrea Skinner. That erasure is not only done by men, of course. There are also the women who enable them.
In “Too Much Happiness,” Munro retells the story of Sofya, a Russian mathematician who lived during the late 1800s and whose findings on partial differential equations made her the most significant female scientist of her time. (Here, I use the Russian spelling Sofya to distinguish between the real woman and the fictional character whose name Munro altered to Sofia.) In addition to being a mathematician and an author, Sofya was a wife and a mother—though her marriage was a formality she orchestrated to leave Russia to pursue an advanced education, and her child was sent to live with relatives so that Sofya could remain dedicated to her work. In Munro’s story, Sofia is rendered a bit like a schoolgirl due to her all-consuming love for the man she intends to marry.
Like many, I have assigned myself the task of reconsidering Munro’s authorial intent as it relates to the inner lives of the fictional women and children in her stories—though one’s intent can be easily manipulated into a digestible excuse, perhaps of the same sort that allowed Munro to stay with her husband in the face of proven abuse. I have done this somewhat involuntarily, knowing it’s probably the wrong task altogether, as it further centers Munro instead of Skinner—Munro, who chose to view her daughter’s sexual violation as a betrayed wife instead of as a mother.
Toward the end of her life, Sofya fell in love but never intended to marry, perhaps understanding the contractual realities of a woman binding herself to a man. Munro’s reimagined Sofia is engaged to her lover and acknowledges that she is unable “to think of anything but him”; this “at the very time when she should [be] working day and night.” Ultimately, it is Sofia’s impending nuptials to this man—who retreats emotionally after she receives a major award because, in the glow of her success, “he had felt himself ignored”—that is the too much happiness that kills her. In this way, the narrative suggests that the marriage of equals is impossible.