2015
First Published
3.97
Average Rating
104
Number of Pages
“[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
Avg Rating
3.97
Number of Ratings
3,541
5 STARS
34%
4 STARS
37%
3 STARS
22%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
Sarah Manguso
Author · 11 books
Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books, most recently 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, all works of autobiographical nonfiction. Her other books include the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape and the poetry collections 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. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles, where she currently teaches creative writing at Antioch University. Her first novel, Very Cold People, is forthcoming in February 2022 from Hogarth Books and Picador UK.
