Hey, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. On the one hand, it's a story we're all

familiar with. She falls in love with him. They get married. He turns out to be kind of a dirtbag.

And yet in her new novel, Liar's author Sarah Manguso makes this story feel fresh through the sheer force of her writing style.

Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women.

It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.

It's a book about a marriage, a really bad one in case you didn't pick that up from that short line

there. And Mangusa and I talked about how her style worked in conveying the feelings a bad

marriage arouses, and also about the Bill of Goods women are sold about marriage. That's ahead.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, Sarah. Hey. This book is about a marriage dissolving, at least in part due to infidelity. I've heard you say before that this book is mostly fiction except for the parts that actually happened to you. Can you tell us a bit

about that? Sure. I wrote this book in less than two years during a high conflict divorce and being

the primary parent to my young child during COVID. I was fueled by pure rage and I needed to put

it somewhere, so I wrote this book. And of course,

it's alluring to think that every novel is a Romano Clay, that it's secretly a memoir. But this

book is a novel because I needed to let Jane, the protagonist, be both angrier and freer in the end

than I thought I had permission to be. And was it like a cathartic experience,

or did you just want to get it out? Honestly, I experience all of my writing as cathartic and

...