Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
104 pages
|Published: 3 Mar 2015
|Editions
|Details
This edition
ISBN: 9781555977030
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication date: 3 March 2015
Description
“[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed. ” ― The New Yorker In Ongoingness , Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept 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, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary―it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. “Bold, elegant, and honest. . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy. ” ― The Paris Review “Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life. . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read. ” ―Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
