Ongoingness: the End of a Diary

Description

Sarah Manguso kept a meticulous diary for twenty-five years. 'I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,' she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, of eight hundred thousand words, became a daily attempt to remember, to fix the passage of time. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two events caused a monumental shift that changed her relationship to time and to mortality, and also to her diary. Ongoingness is a beautiful, daring, honest and shifting work that grapples with writing, motherhood and time.

Sarah Manguso is the author of 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, The Two Kinds of Decay, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, Siste Viator, and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at institutions including Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Scripps College, and the University of Iowa. She lives in Los Angeles.

After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time--about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it. -- Miranda July Written without vanity, Ongoingness is a sparse, poignant essay on mortality, memory and transience, and how her experience of these has changed after motherhood. * Financial Times * The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingness is a short book but there's nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit. -- Jenny Offill Using placid, plainspoken speech, Ongoingness 'sees through the surface to the depths,' as Virginia Woolf, another time-traveler, once put it. Manguso's alchemy here is to turn an homage to missing excess (her unprinted diary) into a work suffused with its own fullness and gravity -- Maggie Nelson This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire. -- Zadie Smith Sarah Manguso's works are brief but their effects are moving and lingering. * Elle * This absorbing book - brief as a breath - examines the need to record. It seems, even if she never spells it out, that writing the diary was a compulsive rebuffing of mortality. Like all diarists, she was trying to commandeer time. A diary gives the writer the illusion of stopping time in its tracks. And time - making her peace with its ongoingness - is Manguso's obsession. Her book hints at diary-keeping as neurosis, a hoarding that is almost a syndrome, a malfunction, a grief at having no way to halt loss. * Observer * [Manguso] has written the memoir we didn't realize we needed. * The New Yorker * Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict's testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy. * The Paris Review * Heaven is the beautiful intense prose of Sarah Manguso. -- Poroshista Khapour Ongoingness confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art. Underwriting this book, as is true of all of Manguso's books, is writing itself. Or, rather, the writing is about itself in the best, most vital sense. Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the most fundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value. I am in awe. -- David Shields In Ongoingness some of her lines were so perfect and proverbial that I copied them in my diary because I needed that reminder. Especially on motherhood and self-effacement. Manguso's lines are denser than diamonds. -- Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read. -- Maria Popova * Brain Pickings *