Poet and essayist Sarah Manguso writes in the opening sentence of this strangely compelling book:
"I started keeping a diary twenty five years ago. It's eight hundred thousand words long."
How did it get so long? Manguso admits that she at first wrote down everything that happened to her in order not to lose anything. "The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it."
One of the reasons Ongoingness is worth reading is that it fits right in with the cultural trend of first-person glimpses into people's lives via social media. Another is that it ties in with the phenomenon of apps that keep track of what you eat and how many steps you've taken in a day.
We are a little disappointed that Manguso has decided not to quote the diary itself. But that's okay, we are glad to retrieve any small insights from this talented writer. Perhaps her short, aphoristic sentences are a preview of what is to come in future memoirs. Here are a few gems to ponder:
- "What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began."
- "I knew I was grown up when I spent time with [my parents] and felt not just the weight of my old memories but the weight of theirs, from when they were children."
- "I'm told that even a newborn, in its first months outside its mother's body, remembers the underwater sounds of the womb."
Ongoingness proves that Manguso's diary was for her a vivid training ground for writing this post-modern memoir about time, memory, and impermanence.
