Ongoingness - by Sarah Manguso (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"In her third book that 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 amid the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us"--Publisher's website.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>"[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn't realize we needed." --<i>The New Yorker</i></b> <p/>In <i>Ongoingness</i>, 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. <p/>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. <p/><i>Ongoingness</i> 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. <p/>"Bold, elegant, and honest . . . <i>Ongoingness</i> reads variously as an addict's testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy." --<i>The Paris Review</i> <p/>"Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read." --Maria Popova, <i> Brain Pickings</i></p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>"[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 either a meditative essay or a revealing confessional poem, this is a thoughtful, reflective look at one talented writer's creative evolution." --<i>Kirkus Reviews</i> <p/>"This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire." --<i>Zadie Smith</i> <p/>"After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time--about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. <i>Ongoingness</i> is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it." --<i>Miranda July</i> <p/>"The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. <i>Ongoingness</i> is a short book but there's nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit." --<i>Jenny Offill</i> <p/>"It seemed scarcely possible that, after <i>The Two Kinds of Decay</i> and <i>The Guardians</i>, Sarah Manguso's work could get more urgent, but somehow it has.<i> Ongoingness</i> confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art. Underwriting this book, as is true of all of Manguso's books, is writing itself. Or, rather, the writing is about itself in the best, most vital sense. Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the most fundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value. I am in awe." --<i>David Shields</i> <p/>"Sarah Manguso's personal meditation on time and memory begins at the center of a dilemma: how to let time go by without losing the life it contains. <i>Ongoingness</i> is a diary turned inside out, an answer to the writer's question, 'what do I do with all the words of my life.' It's a quiet argument for letting go and going on." --<i>Lewis Hyde</i></p><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Sarah Manguso</b> is the author of three memoirs, <i>Ongoingness</i>, <i>The Guardians</i>, and <i>The Two Kinds of Decay</i>; a story collection; and two poetry collections. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at St. Mary's College.
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