The Play-in Match
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 6 • PLAY-IN MATCH
All Fours
v. Liars
v. The Wedding People
Judged by Hannah Pearl Utt
Director, writer, and actor Hannah Pearl Utt grew up a largely feral autodidact in Santa Barbara, Calif. (the Mike Mills version, not the Nancy Meyers version), and came to filmmaking through her love of community, beauty, and eccentricity. Her latest feature film, Cora Bora, starring Meg Stalter, premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival, and was theatrically released by Brainstorm Media. Her first feature film, Before You Know It, which she also co-wrote and starred in, premiered in competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where she was listed as one of IndieWire’s 25 Female Filmmakers to Watch. In addition to her feature work, Hannah directed, co-wrote, and starred in the Super Deluxe digital series, Disengaged, alongside Jen Tullock following the success of their Sundance short film, Partners. Hannah has been selected to participate in numerous programs through the Sundance Institute, including their inaugural Catalyst Women’s Initiative, Screenwriter and Directors Lab, and Film Two, and as a mentor for Ignite. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / 📷 @whuttsthebigdeal
The theme for the play-in round this year is “a crisis in the marriage plot.” I volunteered to judge this module because I’m currently working on a movie about marriage, am relatively newly married myself, and have recently been watching more than a few marriages disintegrate. I was primed to take these books personally, and I suppose for that reason, my opinion was weighted toward the book I found most affecting.
I started All Fours with a bit of an eye-roll. It’s set in places I know well, amidst the type of successful Silver Lake hipsters I used to wait on and babysit for, and I thought, “There’s no way you’re going to make me care.” But the novel’s at once lyrical and dry style felt like stand-up poetry tailored specifically to my sense of humor, and it softened me for the story’s emotional turns. I found the book’s depiction of a traumatic childbirth experience, its effect on the narrator’s relationship, and pretty much all of her observations about motherhood particularly moving. The sentence, “Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it,” got an amen out of me.
All Fours is especially gifted at identifying the more cringy aspects of human desire and ego. I found its strange and playful depiction of a woman literally building a cocoon in limbo to be a brilliant way of exploring perimenopause—one of the book’s main themes. But as the story moved into navigating the ins-and-outs of an open marriage, it all started to feel too… of a particular time and place. This was likely due to the fact that most of my friends are on Feeld. I also had the suspicion that the author, who bears a striking resemblance to the narrator, was still too “in it” to trust her insights on the post-monogamy romance she depicts.
Liars, in contrast, had a truthfulness that I felt came from the author’s seeming proximity to the subject matter—regardless of whether or not that’s the case, I took it very personally. The book is an exhaustive accounting of an awful marriage from the wife’s perspective. I have a very healthy marriage to a helpful and thoughtful partner, and yet aspects of this exaggerated patriarchal nightmare still resonated with me—so much so that I was actively mean to my loving husband while in the throes of the book.
There were aspects of the narrator’s husband that reminded me of specific pieces of shit I’ve dated, but more impactful was the universal feeling of unfairness and rage around a woman’s role in a marriage and family. This was a feeling I wasn’t even fully aware I’d been harboring.
I resisted the urge to send the following sentence to a dozen friends: “John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.” I didn’t send it because I didn’t want them to think it was reflective of my relationship or their relationships, but I knew they would get it on a gut level.
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Liars is a freight train of resentment with such a clear villain that I would question the accuracy of the account coming from my closest friend. But as I sat with the book— it was a hard one to shake—I realized this is its power. By embracing so unapologetically one person’s perspective on something that happened between two people, Manguso is able to capture the inherent paradox of joining your life to someone else’s.
The easy humor of The Wedding People was a refreshing palate cleanser to the blunt churn of Liars. The premise immediately had me giggling with the type of joke structure one wants to repeat. “A woman, in the wake of her divorce, goes to a fancy hotel to kill herself, and realizes upon arrival that the entire rest of the hotel has been rented out for a wedding.” As someone who’s struggled with depression, I always appreciate a cheeky approach to suicide.
It is a testament to the pleasantness of the writing that I was still interested when the story took a sharp turn away from the macabre toward what is essentially will-they-won’t-they. Observations like, “Love is visible—it paints the air between two people a different color, and everyone can see it” kept me interested, but in general I felt the plot took precedence over authenticity. In this sense, I couldn’t help feeling like the story would be better suited for a film, a medium in which one expects the plot to dictate the character’s actions to a degree.
The book had many of the same strengths as some of my favorite films: snappy dialogue, scenes with tension and clear objectives, and an assortment of strong characters whose proximity to one another is ripe for humor and interpersonal hijinks. While I could see this being the book’s draw for one reader, for me, an important criteria for judging art—which we all know just comes down to preference—is whether the medium suits the story.
In order for me to want to read something instead of watching it, or admiring it on canvas, or puzzling over it expressed in dance, there are a few key things I require. Language that inspires or moves me. A window into the psyche of the characters or author. And some deep truth that will still resonate 50 or 100 years from now.
In my field as a filmmaker I have to endure hundreds of publicly expressed opinions about my work. Reviews are a requisite for success. What I rarely get, however, is context. Like, did that reviewer who called my movie “shrill” have a complicated relationship with his mother? Was that person on Letterboxd who called my movie “genius” my mother? Context matters. I would recommend each of these books to different people at different times in their lives, and for this mother and wife whose loved ones’ marriages are all falling apart, Liars would be my recommendation to myself. It gets my vote, however, because a book that can make me consider ending my own truly wonderful partnership has a kind of shrill genius that transcends context.
Advancing:
Liars
Match Commentary
with the Tournament of Books staff
Rosecrans Baldwin: We’re doing it again. We’re doing it again! Welcome, everybody, to the 2025 edition of the Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes. We’ve been doing this annually since 2005, and as every sports fan these days seems to shout when they’re excited, Let’s gooooooooo.
Andrew Womack: Hello everyone! Before we go any further, I want to say that the Tournament of Books isn’t just presented by Field Notes; in fact, they’re part of the ToB DNA. As many (all?) of you know, Field Notes has sponsored this event and produced a beautifully crafted Rooster notebook for about as long as any of us can remember. And this year is no exception, but it is a little different: This time around, Field Notes is donating the profits from the sales of its 2025 Rooster Book to the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans, a cause that I know is important to everyone who cares about the future of literature—in other words, everyone here. So please, definitely consider picking up some copies of this year’s Rooster Book. It’s more important than ever.
Rosecrans: We also want to say an enormous thanks to all of our Sustaining Members. Without them, this thing doesn’t happen—for real.
If you’re not a member yet, think of it as the ticket price for a month-long event. Andrew and I spend just as much time planning and producing prior to and during the ToB as your typical Taylor Swift Eras crew (actually, I have no idea if this is true).
If you can support in any way, we are exceedingly grateful.
Andrew: And members also receive 50 percent off everything at the Tournament of Books Store, now stocked with 2025 tees and mugs, as well as a new limited-run Rooster hat. And now, over to Alana Mohamed and Meave Gallagher for our play-in match commentary!
Meave Gallagher: Alana.
Alana Mohamed: Meave, hello!
Meave: Here we are again! It’s awfully nice to see you. And everyone below, too—welcome, Commentariat. It is 2025, the year everyone learns what “resisting” really means while experiencing a nonstop anxiety attack!
Alana: Let’s not speak for everyone! It could be the year we all emerge clear-eyed about the ills of the world (and become better suited to solve them). In either case, it’s very fitting that Liars takes the win here. Or, at least, I think so, as a chronically single person. What did you think?
Meave: Judge Utt’s kicker, I don’t know. My eyebrows are still descending from where they shot up around my hairline.
Alana: Certainly a provocative line, though mostly I wondered if what spoke to Judge Utt necessarily “transcend[s] context.”
Meave: I wouldn’t say so.
As a “chronically single” person, what did you think of all the marriage navel-gazing? Also, had you heard of Feeld? I had to look it up and it made me kind of depressed. Which is judgmental and unfair, but it’s a terrible name for another facet of online dating, which had just started to be horrible when I stopped using it. I’m old, Alana—one of my friends met her husband because he answered her Craigslist personals ad. This was still normal in 2007 San Francisco.
Alana: I am on Feeld, but am generally a little depressed by how scripted people’s pleasures seem to be. That being said, I’m old enough that I’ve been on many iterations of dating apps (I was on OKCupid and Plenty of Fish), and they are all kind of terrible because human beings never know what will help them click with another one.
Meave: My husband and I met 11 years ago on OKCupid. We’ll have been married for nine years in April. For my many faults, I can’t fathom either treating him like All Fours’ Miranda July self-insert, or him treating me like the husbands in Liars and The Wedding People. I couldn’t be married to him if one of us held the other in such disregard. Liars especially. Why did the narrator—someone with a career and at least one friend—live inside “the universal feeling of unfairness and rage around a woman’s role in a marriage and family” for so many years, as Judge Utt put it?
Maybe because I didn’t raise any kids of my own, I don’t feel this as deeply? But I wonder what “universal” means here. How literally are we meant to take it? I don’t have any answers—it just made me think about how many mothers, fathers, and adult children living with their parents in Gaza I’ve met this past year, and how they describe their relationships to one another. It’s definitely different from how I’d describe my relationship to either of my parents, especially my mom.
Alana: Ah, as someone who grew up with her mother complaining very openly about marriage, each of these books confirmed my most cynical thoughts about the institution. I am glad to hear you don’t feel this way about your husband, but I’ve always imagined that a society’s expectations of a mother to a baby would filter into the most progressive of marriages. To me this seems inevitable, so it was a relief to see them articulated on the page with such passion. I guess because it confirms my own avoidance of dating/relationships/terrible men/good men who are transformed by their own privilege into symbols of resentment.
Meave: Maybe because of the family curse (a story for another time), I’ve never had much difficulty leaving. God forbid I ever use them, but I have multiple plans for “what if I have to leave tomorrow?” I’d rather live on my own terms alone than with someone who actively hated me, or vice versa.
Rereading the judgment, I think I’m missing what of Liars—this “freight train of resentment” that caused the judge to be “actively mean to [her] loving husband”—was appealing. “[F]or this mother and wife whose loved ones’ marriages are all falling apart, Liars would be my recommendation to myself” is an absolute grenade of a sentence whose pin she doesn’t pull. Is it supposed to refer back to knowing so many people on Feeld? Does she see those facts as related?
Alana: I think much of it comes from that “universal feeling of unfairness and rage.” This past year, I narrowly avoided being trapped in a relationship with a very manipulative man who had a young child, and even then I slipped into a self-sacrificing maternal mode that I understand as “a woman’s role in…family.” I guess the appeal is highly personal—I kind of like that the book that was most affecting got the win.
Meave: You know, that’s not the first time I’ve heard such a story. And I have a lot of questions, but they’re not appropriate for this venue.
So, with that, Liars chugs into the Tournament, which begins tomorrow with Molly Templeton adjudicating James versus The Book Censor’s Library, and commentary by booth stalwarts John Warner and Kevin Guilfoile. Good luck with those brackets, everyone!
Today’s mascot
Say hello this year’s first mascot, Reese, nominated by Hazel!
Reese is one half Chihuahua, possibly one quarter Jack Russell, and definitely one quarter chocolate babka. Don’t let her dignified senior aura intimidate you! Her greatest joys in this life are half-toothlessly gnawing on beached crabs and wowing the neighbors with a 10.0 handstand when she pees.
Reese is rooting for Beautyland to take the Rooster because she assumes that must also be the the name of the place she came from, and because that's what her person told her to pick (for a treat).
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.)