Ongoingness: The End of a Diary Contributor(s): Manguso, Sarah (Author) |
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ISBN: 1555977650 ISBN-13: 9781555977658 Publisher: Graywolf Press OUR PRICE: $13.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2016 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Literary Collections | Essays |
Dewey: 814.6 |
LCCN: 2014950981 |
Physical Information: 0.2" H x 5" W x 7.5" (0.20 lbs) 104 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: " 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 we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. "Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict's 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 |
Contributor Bio(s): Manguso, Sarah: - Sarah Manguso is the author of a memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay; books of poetry, Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise; and a short-story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. |