Sarah Manguso kept a meticulous diary 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, of eight hundred thousand words, became a daily attempt to remember, to fix the passage of time.
Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two events caused a monumental shift that changed her relationship to time and to mortality, and also to her diary.
Ongoingness is a beautiful, daring, honest and shifting work that grapples with writing, motherhood and time. Sarah Manguso is the author of 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, The Two Kinds of Decay, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, 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. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at institutions including Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Scripps College, and the University of Iowa. She lives in Los Angeles. The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingnessis a short book but there's nothing small about it. - Jenny Offill
