Overview

""[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

Full Product Details

9798228792692

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Sarah Manguso is the author of three memoirs, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay; a story collection; and two poetry collections. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at St. Mary's College. An actor of twenty-five-plus years, Amy Gorelow has used her extensive ear for accents in most of her audiobooks. She speaks French and Russian, and is also a multi-instrumentalist, excelling at the string bass. She lives in Chicago.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available