Ongoingness

Starred review from January 12, 2015
The subtitle of Manguso’s elegant, slim meditation is both deceptive and true. Though she despises endings—time, she reiterates, is not a journey from one fixed point to another but rather a never-ending continuum—she wants to explore what it means to end something that for so long made up a crucial part of her identity: for 25 years, Manguso kept a diary, a document that’s now more than 800,000 words. Rather than just recording momentous events, she admits that “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.” Curiously, this new volume, which is not the diary—an afterword discusses her decision process whether or not to excerpt it—but a reflection on the process itself and what it meant to her to be so focused on documenting and giving meaning to moments that might, in fact, have no meaning. It would be too simplistic—and nothing about Manguso’s prose, despite its sparseness, is simple—to conflate her role as a mother with her changing views on the nature of time and the meaning, or lack thereof, of moments. Structured somewhat like a prose poem—there’s more white space on each page than there is text—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. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit.

November 15, 2014
A chronic diarist discovers that there's a lot to be said for putting your pen down.There seems be a pattern with Manguso. The more weighty and personal her books get, dealing with everything from her own dread illness (Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, 2008) to a friend's suicide (The Guardians: An Elegy, 2012), the shorter they are. Her latest is remarkably brief, with more white space than print, devoted to the seemingly dull topic of why she quit her diary. But the brevity is the point: Where Manguso's 25-year journal was obsessively detailed, this eulogy doesn't have a wasted word. She's 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. "I didn't want to lose anything," Manguso states at the beginning. "That was my main problem. I couldn't face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened." The diary eventually became a crutch for survival: "If I allowed myself to drift through undocumented time for more than a day, I'd be swept up, no longer able to remember the purpose of continuing." Keeping a diary meant imposing a shape or structure on life, a view that changed when motherhood ruptured her own space-time continuum: "I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against." 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.

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