Ongoingness

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
Ongoingness confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art. Underwriting this book, as is true of all of Manguso's books, is writing itself. Or, rather, the writing is about itself in the best, most vital sense. Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the most fundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value. I am in awe. -- David Shields
In Ongoingness some of her lines were so perfect and proverbial that I copied them in my diary because I needed that reminder. Especially on motherhood and self-effacement. Manguso's lines are denser than diamonds. -- Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You
Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read. -- Maria Popova * Brain Pickings *