Sarah Manguso

[b:Very Cold People|58082210|Very Cold People|Sarah Manguso|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1637603379l/58082210._SY75_.jpg|81125603] is a novel by [a:Sarah Manguso|52289|Sarah Manguso|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1631212603p2/52289.jpg] which describes the tormented New England childhood of a youngster told in first person vignettes in a deadpan style. She is the only child of unloving, somewhat odd parents. Her suffering is revealed in her behavioral peculiarities (not eating, pulling out her eyelashes, peeling fingernails, silences). Her parents respond unexpectedly, sometimes cruelly, yet they throw birthday parties for her and she enjoys swimming, skating, piano lessons and acting in the school play. Despite their penuriousness and devotion to thrift shops, they live in a nice house with "three porches and a balcony" in a good neighborhood. Various childhood traumas with the narrator's friends are described and make up a thread common to many of us stumbling through adolescence. An undercurrent of sexual assault runs through the story, her mother, her cousin, her own encounters on the subway, in the hospital where she spends time in therapy. "My mother had borne my loathing for years like someone wrongly accused, quietly serving her unearned sentence knowing that she would someday be free, but not yet" yet she raises a child of her own decades later "who has grown up knowing ordinary love." The writing is good and the characters are well described although I had trouble tracking her friends. I particularly enjoyed her fantasies about the house's prior occupant and her love interests. I wouldn't go through adolescence again for anything. [a:Sarah Manguso|52289|Sarah Manguso|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1631212603p2/52289.jpg] has produced an apt story of the tribulations of growing up.… (mere)

Manguso’s slim volume of precise prose reads like autofiction as she dispassionately describes the end of her fifteen-year marriage to John who’s cheating. “When you’re a liar, you always know something that other people don’t know. Maybe lying to me made John feel extra smart.”
But no one gets off the hook as the narrator admits: “I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage. It took effort. It felt so good to stop lying,” hence the title. Her reactions are visceral and compounded by the questions her young son asks.
I welcome another Manguso.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.… (mere)