Liars v. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 24 • QUARTERFINALS
Liars
v. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Judged by Emily Hughes
Emily C. Hughes wants to scare you. Formerly the editor of Unbound Worlds and TorNightfire.com, she writes about horror and curates a list of the year’s new scary books. Her first book, Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You’re Too Scared to Watch, is out now from Quirk Books. You can find her writing elsewhere in the New York Times, Vulture, Reactor Magazine, Electric Literature, Nightmare Magazine, Thrillist, and more. Emily lives in crunchy western Massachusetts with her husband and four idiot cats. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I have a non-major connection to Kelly Link—we live in the same town, I frequent her bookstore, and we’ll often stop and chat about books if we’re there at the same time, but we’re not any closer than that.” /readjumpscares.com / Bluesky / Instagram
Margo
The walls are closing in on Margo: She’s barely an adult, with no money, no support system, and a new baby. Her mother is no help, nor are her roommates. Her lack of childcare leads to the loss of her waitressing job, which she needs to pay for childcare, which she needs to maintain a job, etc. Her son’s father, a coward, wants nothing to do with her or the baby. Margo has every right to feel sorry for herself, to feel angry, to turn inward—which she does, here or there, for a minute or two. But then she stands up, shakes herself off, and gets on with it. And by “it,” I mean OnlyFans.
Disarming is the word I keep returning to here. Generous is another. Every page brims with warmth and humor and love, even when things are hard. Thorpe has boundless empathy for these characters and their charms and foibles and blind spots. Margo doesn’t take herself particularly seriously (nor does Margo, for that matter). She’s smart and insightful, if naive and impulsive, but the novel always treats her with clear-eyed respect. It’s a funny book (regarding the business of desire, Margo thinks “She would never pay fifteen dollars to look at a guy naked. You could buy two, possibly three sandwiches for fifteen dollars.”) as well as an emotionally honest one (a desperate, exhausted Margo muses on “how much kindness would mean right now, and how unwilling anyone was to give it”).
It’s also not a novel that ignores the grimmer realities of poverty and addiction and sex work—it’s soaked in the immediate and ever-present awareness of money and its lack. Some portion of Margo’s mind is always preoccupied with sums and tallies and outstanding balances to be added and subtracted from her ever-dwindling bank account. When her father, a retired wrestler named Jinx who suffers from chronic pain after years of injuries in the ring, has a heroin relapse, it’s upsetting and moving. The few wealthy characters in the novel throw money at lawyers and bureaucracy, wielding NDAs and trust funds like weapons. Margo’s mother Shyanne contorts herself into someone unrecognizable in the hope of achieving a better life through marriage, something Margo understands and rejects for herself. And of course there’s the shame everyone seems to think she should feel for how she makes her income.
This is all underpinned by Thorpe’s writing, which is clever and playful, but never at the expense of emotional clarity and honesty. And there’s a deft little narrative trick at play that lends depth to how we understand Margo: The book jumps between perspectives, using the third person when Present Day Margo is recounting a particular event and the first person when she’s remembering one (usually this is reserved for particularly painful or difficult moments). I don’t know that this is entirely successful—it confused me for the first few chapters, and the whole device is handled with perhaps too light a touch—but it’s a neat way to introduce the idea of storytelling as a type of persona-construction akin to what Margo’s doing on OnlyFans and what Jinx did in the ring (and, on a metafictional level, what Thorpe is doing on the page). Without it, this would be a much more conventional book, so I’m glad it’s part of the mix.
What it comes down to is that I really just loved spending time in this book. I loved these characters and all their messiness. I loved Jinx and his earnest desire to support his daughter and grandson. I loved Suzie, Margo’s nerdy cosplaying roommate. I loved Margo’s OnlyFans penpal, JB, and her two partners in crime, WangMangler and SucculentRose. I would’ve read a dozen more of Margo’s descriptions of dick pics as Pokémon (that her OnlyFans becomes a genuine creative outlet for her is a great touch). I loved watching Margo go through it and figure it out, which, when you think about it, is all any of us are ever doing.
Jane
Liars is a taut, seething little thing, bubbling with rage and grief, the story of the end of an awful, unremarkable marriage. “Elegies are the best love stories because they’re the whole story,” writes Jane, Manguso’s protagonist. She’s not wrong: After all, the defining trait of a Shakespearean comedy is that it ends at the wedding, before the bitter quotidian realities of marriage set in, and set in they certainly do in this story.
If a novel is, to any degree, a conversation between author and reader, Liars felt like a long-overdue call with an old friend who complains for 45 uninterrupted minutes before giving you the space to respond to a single word. At times it takes on the dizzying, circular feeling of having the same conversation for the 87th time, when you’re fresh out of sympathetic noises and it’s all you can do not to scream, “I know you’re miserable, but what are you going to do about it?”
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I don’t know, man. Maybe that’s unfair. Manguso is clearly a very talented writer, both technically and emotionally, and one of the strongest elements of the book is her demonstration of how Earth-shatteringly difficult it is to first accept that you must leave a marriage, and then to actually do it. I felt tremendous anger at John, the husband—how could I not, with descriptions like “He told me I was acting like a spoiled child, that the postpartum period was so much easier than his life, working at the bank instead of being an artist?” John is the worst kind of manchild: a petty tyrant, resentful, emotionally immature, a terrible communicator, a philanderer. He’s also entirely, tragically average. Every act of gaslighting, manipulation, cheating, and misdirection he commits is something I, or a woman I know, has experienced from a male partner. I have known women who divorced this man. I know women who are still married to this man. I hate him.
Jane, quite frankly, wasn’t much better. She’s efficient and responsible, yes, and a good mother, we think (even though an unspoken “unlike his fucking father” seems to follow every description of her son’s good qualities). She’s obviously and understandably angry: she has no support system, she’s constantly uprooted by John’s job changes, she’s endlessly stressed about money and childcare and Covid and attempts to maintain her relationship. But the bitterness is hard to stomach at times. Take these three quotes, all of which arrive in a span of about four pages:
“Maybe the trouble was simply that men hate women.”
“Romance is nothing but a cheap craft-store decoration made to sanitize a desire to fuck.”
“A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement.”
Look, heteropessimism is nothing new. #YesAllWomen happened over a decade ago now, and that style of Kill All Men misandry is now more meme than movement. I have two problems with “women’s rage” novels: The first is that I am tired—exhausted, bone-fucking-weary—of stories about how poorly men treat women. I have been reading them, without hyperbole, since I was old enough to pick a book off the shelf under my own steam. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should exist, for what it’s worth—what I keep reminding myself is that every story like Liars, which points to a common strain of male malfeasance and says “this is bad, actually” has the potential to be someone’s first exposure to that idea. That has value! If someone picks up Liars and recognizes their own relationship inside it and realizes they don’t have to continue to suffer, great. But I am not that person, and I haven’t been that person for a long time. The continuing necessity of these stories fills me with indescribable rage. That’s not the book’s fault; I own that. But it’s related to my second problem, which is:
I can’t accept anger as an endpoint anymore. You have to do something with it, or at least find a place to channel it. We are, in our sadly nonfictional reality, currently grappling with the global ramifications of anger with no outlet, anger that radiates out in every direction and at every angle, anger that squats and congeals and festers and infects rather than giving way to action or change or kindness or empathy. And this novel is soaked in anger. There’s a glimmer, in the last couple paragraphs, of… not happiness, exactly, but maybe peace. But it comes from the passage of time, not from anything Jane does. Throughout the book she portrays herself as having very little agency. She does not act, she’s acted upon. To some degree, that’s Jane herself being unreliable (or at least feeling sorry for herself), and as a character study it works, but it left me feeling faintly grimy in a way that was neither edifying nor, I’m sorry to say, particularly interesting. It’s not that I believe fiction needs to be one particular thing—I’m no prescriptivist when it comes to storytelling—but this book is so inward-looking that it becomes claustrophobic. Jane’s all-consuming bitterness simply leaves no room for anything else.
An aside, too, about the style of this book: Look, I love a big swing. I love a formal experiment and an artistic affectation. But many of the choices here left me cold at best and shoved me out of the story at worst. There are no quotation marks—rare moments of dialogue are rendered in italics. The whole thing is presented in short, choppy paragraphs, anywhere from one to four sentences in length, which, at times, makes it feel as though you’re reading a kind of literary microblogging. Jane insists on referring to sex with her husband as “sessions” (“intimate,” “glorious,” and, ugh, “penetrative”) and never once calls her son by name, referring to him exclusively as “the child.” Not infrequently, an arch attempt at lyrical phrasing would stop me in my tracks entirely, and not for good reasons: “I poured tears,” “I floated facedown in housewifery,” “I shitted a gallon.” I can infer the likely motivations behind each of these choices, but that feels like trying to argue myself out of my honest experience, which was: This is too much! The balance is off: The style is wearing the story rather than the other way around.
Margo & Jane
Consider Margo and Jane: That these two books share so much thematic ground makes them a particularly interesting pairing. Both books treat sex and women’s sexuality frankly and without euphemism. Both are honest about the grueling isolation of motherhood in contemporary America, where social and institutional support for mothers is either nonexistent or prohibitively expensive. Both are hyper-aware of money, the need for it, the lack of it, the enormity of it when it’s all you can think about. In both books, men weaponize details of these women’s lives—Jane’s garden-variety mental illness, exacerbated by her marital circumstances, becomes, in John’s retelling, a destabilizing and dangerous condition that makes her unfit and exculpates him entirely. Mark, the father of Margo’s child, files for custody of the son he’s never even met, claiming her occupation and living situation will put the child at risk.
Both novels also play with the act of storytelling and the construction of persona: how we present ourselves to our loved ones, to strangers, but also how we tell stories about ourselves to understand ourselves. Thorpe uses the switch between first and third person to shade in the difference between memory and retelling; throughout Liars, Jane writes (and rewrites, and re-rewrites) the story of her marriage in small, digestible capsules, an attempt to get her arms around her own story. In a world where agency is not guaranteed, the act of shaping their own narratives gives both these women some measure of control.
But the difference in attitude toward that control couldn’t be more stark. From Liars: “I began to understand what a story is. It’s a manipulation. It’s a way of containing unimaginable chaos.” And from Margo: “Because that’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.” It’s a matter of either hardening ourselves to grow a shell against the cold, careless world, or of opening ourselves up to it, even at the risk of being hurt. Again, it’s not that I think fiction should be pedagogical. But insofar as storytelling can show us other ways to be, which is what I’m craving above all else right now, I know which reality I’d rather spend time in.
Advancing:
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: Judge Hughes’s reaction to Liars is relatable. The novel is largely a metaphor. The main characters are Jane and John, the names we use to represent the Everywoman and Everyman. Jane, of course, is not every woman, but she is many women. John is not every man, but he’s a lot of fucking men. Their child is not really a character so much as the concept of one. The complication of a child. So while much of this book feels raw and tense, it’s also meant to keep you at a bit of a distance character-wise. I think it’s an impressive writing feat, but I can also rattle off in my head the names of readers I know who would almost instantly say to themselves, this is not for me.
John Warner: In a way, I give Liars credit for not deviating for the vast majority of the story, perhaps until the end as Judge Hughes notes, though I don’t necessarily read a ton of hope into the conclusion myself. It is what it is, but as you say, it’s going to repel some readers. Of course, that’s OK, repelling some readers likely means you’re attracting some too, magnets work that way.
Kevin: In the opening pages, Liars feels almost like there might be a Fates and Furies-type switch-em-up and we are going to get John’s side of the story in the second half. The book’s title does imply, after all, that there is more than one liar here. We never get John’s perspective, so we are left with the possibility that Jane’s account is not entirely reliable, a suspicion reinforced by her many attempts within the text to rewrite events she has just told us about. It’s another thing that unsettles you about the novel. What is being left out? What isn’t Jane telling me?
John: I have to say, that never occurred to me. I don’t think we’re meant to see Jane as 100 percent reliable as a narrator, but I do think we’re meant to accept that this is very much her experience of her life. Unlike Fates and Furies, where the characters are besotted with each other in complicated ways, which become apparent in the dueling accounts, Liars, from Jane’s point of view, leaves little room for a John version to come in and tell us much of interest. I can’t imagine a story of “actually, my wife really is an unstable loon and I’m not using her humanity as a weapon against her” would have much to offer.
Kevin: Right. I didn’t say it would have been a good idea.
The best book isn’t always the one that’s most fun to read, but in this case, Margo wins the fun title going away.
I had a similar reaction to Judge Hughes concerning the changing points of view. I actually wrote in my notes, early on: “I’m not sure this is working.” It felt like artifice, a constant reminder that the story was made up. But after Margo explains why she’s doing it (and reasserts herself, rather than Thorpe, as the author of the story), I stopped thinking about it. And the novel is, at least in part, about artifice. “All things that are genuinely interesting aren’t quite real,” Margo says. I’m not sure I entirely believe that, but in a novel about professional wrestling and fantasy sex work (where penises are compared, in some detail, to Pokémon), it’s an interesting proposition.
John: I instantly connected to the point-of-view shift, maybe because I did something similar in my own novel many moons ago, but also because the rationale behind it became instantly clear to me as it’s an indicator of Margo ultimately acquiring agency over her life. It all fit.
And really, as you say, the book is just good fun. Entertaining at the scene and line level while working inside a larger architecture that tells a satisfying story. Margo was one of my favorite novels of the year.
Kevin: Margo’s Got Money Troubles has some of that Where’d You Go, Bernadette energy from 2013. Margo has already advanced farther than Bernadette did—it was knocked out by eventual Rooster champ The Orphan Master’s Son—but readers frequently cite it as one of their favorite ToB reads of all time.
If I’m being entirely truthful, Liars does not have the gall to slip into the top two in Zombie voting. If the Zombie Round were held today, All Fours and Beautyland would be our readable wraiths.
Which means our semifinals are set. Tomorrow the James juggernaut meets the mighty Martyr! in the battle for one-word title supremacy. Aditi Khorana will do the deciding. Then on Wednesday The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft will try to vanish Rufi Thorpe’s Margo's Got Money Troubles under the gavel of Sammy Loren.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Jennifer, Timmy (gray) and Topaz (orange) were rescued by Jennifer’s family as abandoned kittens from a used bookstore, so their origin story is rooted in books. Jennifer went in to get A Man Called Ove and came out with two new family members.
All of the things on the internet about orange cats are true, but at the end of the day Timmy remains in charge. They can be distracted from their reading life by the two dogs in our house.
Timmy and Topaz are lobbying for a book with a major cat theme to be represented in the ToB. Starter Villain would have been a good selection.
If you’re interested in nominating a pet as a mascot for this year’s Tournament of Books, contact us for more details. (Please note, this is a paid program.)