The Two Kinds of Decay
2008
First Published
3.97
Average Rating
192
Number of Pages
At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, depression, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.
Avg Rating
3.97
Number of Ratings
2,463
5 STARS
33%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
21%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
1%
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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.
