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

Author Biography

Sarah Manguso is the author of three memoirs, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay; a story collection; and two poetry collections. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at St. Mary's College.

Review

"[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." --Kirkus Reviews "This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire." --Zadie Smith "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. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it." --Miranda July "The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingness is a short book but there's nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit." --Jenny Offill "It seemed scarcely possible that, after The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians, Sarah Manguso's work could get more urgent, but somehow it has. Ongoingness 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." --David Shields "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. Ongoingness 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." --Lewis Hyde

Review Quote

*NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK* A New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice A Best Book of 2015 by The Atlantic , Brain Pickings , The Believer , Entropy , NPR "On Point," Paste Magazine , PopSugar , The Strand Bookstore, and others "A beautiful book. . . . [Manguso''s] powerful and provocative reflections . . . interrogate the mortality we all share." -- The Boston Globe "[ Ongoingness is] a collection of fragmentary, piercing meditations on time, memory, the nature of the self, and the sometimes glorious, sometimes harrowing endeavor of filling each moment with maximum aliveness while simultaneously celebrating its presence and grieving its passage. . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read." --Maria Popova, Brain Pickings "In her almost psychedelic musings on time and what it means to preserve one''s own life, she has managed to transcribe an entirely interior world. She has written the memoir we didn''t realize we needed." -- The New Yorker, Page-Turner "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 experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it." --Miranda July "Manguso draws from her ballooning subject (800,000 words and counting, none of which appear here) an urgent portrait of an artist''s dilemma: how to extract from life some persuasive hedge against death, ''that great and ongoing blank.''" -- The New York Times Book Review "Manguso offers another kind of structural challenge to the traditional confessional style. . . . Her prose feels twice distilled; it''s whiskey rather than beer, writing about writing about life. . . . Manguso [delivers] some beautiful un-forgotten moments, their visceral immediacy brought into even sharper relief by the book''s largely abstract topography." --Leslie Jamison, The Atlantic "Upend[s] the journal form with reflections on marriage, aging, and the selves we leave behind." --Vogue "Compact and crystalline. . . . Like Didion''s memorable ''On Keeping a Notebook,'' [ Ongoingness ] is not a personal record but rather a meditation on the act of recording." --Bookforum "[ Ongoingness is] a ponderous elegy to both her diary and the particular ambition it represented." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "A bold, elegant, and honest confrontation of a diarist''s motivations and neuroses. . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict''s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy." -- The Paris Review , Staff Pick "A beautiful, haunting book." --Tin House "I finished [ Ongoingness ] in one sitting, and as soon as I did I felt sure that I would read it again. There is a remarkable sureness to this book, a calm hush like that of a person who speaks softly so that you lean in to listen." --The Millions "This non-diary diary signals a reinvention or at least a reinvigoration of the form . . . .[A] concise meditation on time, presentism, and memory." --Flavorwire, "10 Must-Read Books for March" " Ongoingness is poem-like in its minimalism, the vast white space asking that the words be savored, lingered on. . . .the writing becomes, in its fragmented, dreamlike recitation of facts and half thoughts, almost a map of the experiential world of a new mother." --San Francisco Chronicle "[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." --Kirkus Reviews "Manguso''s Ongoingness achieves a grace no diary possibly could." -- The National Post "[An] elegant, slim meditation. . . . Manguso''s essay is both grounding and heady, the spark of a larger, important conversation that makes readers all the more eager for her future output." -- Publishers Weekly , starred review "Any diarist will be interested in Manguso''s reflections, but those who have raised children will find their own special kind of ongoingness reflected in her book. . . . A pleasure to read." -- The Pacific Standard "Readers will want to return to [ Ongoingness ] again and again as they consider their own relationships to documenting, remembering and just plain living their lives." -- Bookreporter "[Manguso''s] style is elegant and compelling." -- Full Stop "[Manguso''s] concise, compact sentences have clearly been whittled with a poet''s eye--each word carefully chosen, no room for frills. . . . Nearly every page of Ongoingness has a line that knocks the wind out of you a little." -- The Portland Mercury "Manguso''s reflections [sweep] forward like a flood, somehow covering vast territory and then retreating, leaving a changed landscape in their wake. . . . Bold. . . . [ Ongoingness is a] lucid look at how we move through time." -- The Riveter "The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingness is a short book but there''s nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit." --Jenny Offill "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. O ngoingness 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." --Lewis Hyde "It seemed scarcely possible that, after The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians , Sarah Manguso''s work could get more urgent, but somehow it has. Ongoingness 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." --David Shields

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