So I've already finished this lovely book to the left. I legit bought it last night, read it last night - which took me a whole 45 minutes to read. I've decided to make this a Quick Chat rather than a more long-form critical piece, because I want to reread this before I write anything too substantial, but I still needed to write something. I approached the book knowing I would love it, and oh, I did.
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso is a memoir*...of sorts. This book is about the diary Manguso meticulously kept for 25 years: why she started it, what kept her going, and made her stop, which is (spoilerz not rly): she had a baby. The book is comprised of short meditations on the nature of time, birth, death, the past, memory. Basically, all of the BIG. IDEAS. ABOUT. HUMANITY. In the book, Manguso tries to figure out 'ongoingness': a way of accounting for the present which immediately becomes the past, and a way of being present in her experiences. It's really fascinating, and I think could be an interesting lens through which to analyze our use of social media...but that is a conversation I do not feel like having.
From my first fevered 1AM reading of this book, I love this book. I'm really interested in this kind of memoir writing: it's deeply personal introspection that is also very removed, because Manguso is really trying to get to the exact meaning of things, which is even more interesting because that's what she wanted to do with the diaries she kept. In a review from The Atlantic, the writer says Manguso's prose feels 'twice distilled; it is whiskey rather than beer,' which is perhaps the most accurate description I could read for this book.
For now, let me leave you with a line from the book that is haunting me - which is always a beautiful and daunting feeling from a book. Towards the end of the book, Manguso, who has frantically for the past 25 years been concerned with remembering the right things so that she could make sure she was experiencing life fully, gives in and says, 'the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life' (85). I mentioned before that what sparks the end of intense diary-writing is having a child. In order to more fully participate in the life of her child and be a mother, she needed to let go of the need to obsessively document and revise her life. I have a feeling it's a little more complicated than that, or at least I hope it is, because can it really be that all of the fears she held about dying, time, and living her life fully can only be alleviated because of a baby? Are children really the answer? I don't know. That's one of the things I'm trying to think about from this book, which really does have so much in it.
*Note: My tag for this post is difficult to figure out. This book is technically a memoir, but it is more than that. It's a book that resists strict genre definition, which is fine with me. For now, and for the purposes of this blog, I will simply tag it non-fiction. This may change. I'm still deciding.
For now, let me leave you with a line from the book that is haunting me - which is always a beautiful and daunting feeling from a book. Towards the end of the book, Manguso, who has frantically for the past 25 years been concerned with remembering the right things so that she could make sure she was experiencing life fully, gives in and says, 'the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life' (85). I mentioned before that what sparks the end of intense diary-writing is having a child. In order to more fully participate in the life of her child and be a mother, she needed to let go of the need to obsessively document and revise her life. I have a feeling it's a little more complicated than that, or at least I hope it is, because can it really be that all of the fears she held about dying, time, and living her life fully can only be alleviated because of a baby? Are children really the answer? I don't know. That's one of the things I'm trying to think about from this book, which really does have so much in it.
*Note: My tag for this post is difficult to figure out. This book is technically a memoir, but it is more than that. It's a book that resists strict genre definition, which is fine with me. For now, and for the purposes of this blog, I will simply tag it non-fiction. This may change. I'm still deciding.
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