But I also knew that the most intimate relationship is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child. The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body, the teaching how to lift food to the mouth, how to speak, how to show love according to the feeling of love, how to put on a shoe, how to pick up a spoon, how to wipe one’s own tears, how to piss and shit and be clean. Nothing, nothing in the world like that. That absolute authority of which the baby must be convinced in order to feel safe, separate from the mother’s body. The honor the mother must give the baby, when the baby is ready to know that her absolute authority was never real. The careful timing of the revelation that, baby, you are alone, as alone as anything can be. How lucky you were, baby, to have been a baby with its mother. Now you are ready to start living life in the imagination, to start imagining your way back to every good feeling you don’t quite remember from the days of milk.
— Sarah Manguso, Liars: A Novel (Hogarth, July 23, 2024)
Notes:
- Book Reviews of “Liars”
- By Brian Dillon: When It Comes to a Bad Marriage, Whose Account Can You Trust? NY Times, July 23, 2024.
- By Heather McAlpin: ‘Liars’ is an autopsy of a bitterly disappointing marriage.” (NPR, July 22, 2024)
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
When the nurse brought her, all swaddled up, to the glass-panelled door outside the operating theatre to show her to me, tears projectiled on to the glass, signalling the single most miraculous moment of my life. If there’s a nanosecond’s worth of choice when you fall in love, there was no measure of time between seeing Oilly and feeling the most profound, life-changing love imaginable. Beyond all counting! Our longed for, miracle, baby.