Published in 2015
104 pages
Sarah Manguso (b. 1974) is an American writer and poet. In 2007, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was reviewed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and named a 2008 “Best Nonfiction Book of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, and twice in the Best American Poetry series. She was the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton in 2003–2004, and has been awarded fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Yaddo, and MacDowell Colony, and a Pushcart Prize.
She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She has taught creative writing at the Pratt Institute and in the graduate program at the New School, and currently teaches in the graduate program at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn.
What is this book about?
A dazzling philosophical investigation of the challenge of living in the present, by a brilliant practitioner of the new essay
In her third book, which continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso 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 800,000 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.
