Ongoingness The End of a Diary [Paperback]

[Manguso] has written the memoir we didnt realize we needed. The New Yorker

InOngoingness, 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.

Ongoingnessis a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diaryit 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 . . .Ongoingnessreads variously as an addicts 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

[Manguso is] a Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis, both in the way she distills complex thoughts on time and memory into pure essence and in how she examines writing as a means of control. . . . While Manguso's thoughts are inward, they work outward--from her life to life itself. Read as eithl#&