Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

✍ Scribed by Manguso, Sarah

• Book ID: 110464719
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 88 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781555977030

✦ Synopsis

"[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...