num_pages: 104
description: [Manguso] has written the memoir we didnt 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 diaryit 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 addicts 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
language: English
title: Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
publisher: Graywolf Press