The New York Times Reviews Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

Sarah Manguso is the author of a number of poetry collections including The Captain Lands in Paradise and Siste Viator but in recent years she has also developed a successful career as a non-fiction writer. Her book, The Guardians, remembers a friend who was killed by a Metro-North train. (The New York Times calls it her "second-best book.") However, her newest book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary leaves something more to be desired, in this NYT reviewer's eyes. From The New York Times:

Sarah Manguso’s best book, “The Two Kinds of Decay,” came out seven years ago. It’s about her long battle with a crippling neurological disease, one that forced her during her 20s to have her plasma replaced more than 50 times. It’s a harrowing book. It’s also a funny one. A boyfriend visits her in the hospital and declares her condition “greasy but stable.”

Ms. Manguso’s second-best book, “The Guardians,” came out in 2012. It’s an elegy for a friend who was struck and killed by a Metro-North train. The author works in odd details, such as what it was like for Ms. Manguso to toil on the night shift at The New York Post immediately after Sept. 11. In its fond and spare portrait of her friend, “The Guardians” reads like a version of Calvin Trillin’s “Remembering Denny” (1993) for a new generation.

These books established Ms. Manguso’s modus operandi as a nonfiction writer. (She has also written several books of poetry.) Each is short, smart, meditative and inward-looking, while tipping over only rarely into preciousness and narcissism. Each squats on a perch between poetry and prose. This writer takes literary selfies of a sophisticated sort.

“Ongoingness: The End of a Diary,” out now, is Ms. Manguso’s third book of nonfiction, and it’s not nearly so good as the first two. It’s as slim as a Pop-Tart, and there’s some toasted goo at its center.

“Ongoingness” is a think piece, if you will, about a meticulous diary the author has kept for 25 years. It’s a baggy monster, this diary, topping out at some 800,000 words. In its original Russian, “War and Peace” is only a bit more than half that length.

Ms. Manguso has kept the diary, she says, because she “didn’t want to lose anything.” She wants to think she’s been “truly paying attention.” “Experience itself wasn’t enough,” she adds. “The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.” [...]

Continue reading at The New York Times.