Very Cold People

“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 twentyfive 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