Ongoingness: the End of a Diary - Hardcover

Manguso, Sarah

3.97

3,341 ratings by Goodreads

9781509883295: Ongoingness: the End of a Diary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1509883290 ISBN 13: 9781509883295

Publisher: Picador, 2018

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'This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire.' Zadie Smith

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 conceals a terror that she might miss out something important. Maintaining that diary became a daily attempt to remember every detail, to stop the passage of time.

Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two events slowly and irrevocably changed her relationship to her life and also to her diary.

In this moving memoir Sarah Manguso confesses her life long struggle to let go. Ongoingness is a beautiful, daring and honest and shifting work that grapples with writing and motherhood.

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Review:

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)

Written without vanity, Ongoingness is a sparse, poignant essay on mortality, memory and transience, and how her experience of these has changed after motherhood. (Financial Times)

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)

Using placid, plainspoken speech, Ongoingness 'sees through the surface to the depths,' as Virginia Woolf, another time-traveler, once put it. Manguso’s alchemy here is to turn an homage to missing excess (her unprinted diary) into a work suffused with its own fullness and gravity (Maggie Nelson)

This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire. (Zadie Smith)

Sarah Manguso’s works are brief but their effects are moving and lingering. (Elle)

This absorbing book – brief as a breath – examines the need to record. It seems, even if she never spells it out, that writing the diary was a compulsive rebuffing of mortality. Like all diarists, she was trying to commandeer time. A diary gives the writer the illusion of stopping time in its tracks. And time – making her peace with its ongoingness – is Manguso’s obsession. Her book hints at diary-keeping as neurosis, a hoarding that is almost a syndrome, a malfunction, a grief at having no way to halt loss. (Observer)

[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn't realize we needed. (The New Yorker)

Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict's testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy. (The Paris Review)

Heaven is the beautiful intense prose of Sarah Manguso. (Poroshista Khapour)

Book Description:

A moving, lyrical memoir of pregnancy and becoming a mother from a daring new voice, for fans of Maggie Nelson and Deborah Levy.

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