Published in 2008
192 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?
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.
