For years, the writer Sarah Manguso has kept a rather detailed diary. It takes the form of documents on her computer labeled by year and the common title Differential Equations. She updates it daily, sometimes more often.<\/p>\n
To some, that might sound like a chore. For Manguso, as she describes it in her intriguing new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, it provided something more like pleasure: \u201cI write the diary instead of taking exercise, performing remunerative work, or volunteering my time to the unlucky. It\u2019s a vice.\u201d<\/p>\n
The diary, she says, is almost a million words long. Ongoingness is far shorter. It does not republish the diary, or even excerpt it at all. (In the epilogue, Manguso admits she thought of including quotes from the diary, \u201c[b]ut I didn\u2019t want to read the thing, so I tried to reason my way out of the task\u201d.)<\/p>\n
Instead, Ongoingness is something of a meditation on the practice of diary-keeping. Manguso traces the way her desire to record things has changed over time. At first, she thought there was a tragedy in forgetting: \u201cThe catalogue of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.\u201d But later, in her 40s and with a small child, she found her dairy entries getting shorter and shorter: \u201cReflection disappeared almost completely.\u201d This later attitude is what she calls the \u201cproblem of ongoingness\u201d.<\/p>\n
When I read Ongoingness I was very struck by it but when I went to recommend it to a friend I was at a loss to describe it. I hoped when I spoke to Manguso she\u2019d offer me a shorthand. But though friendly and funny on the phone \u2013 a good deal of Manguso\u2019s appeal in print, too, is her mordant sense of humor \u2013 she has too precise a mind to agree with any category I try to offer. \u201cI was a terrible academic,\u201d she tells me at one point.<\/p>\n
I mentioned some ad copy her publisher, Graywolf Press, had given me. It described Ongoingness as continuing \u201cto define the contours of the contemporary essay\u201d. Manguso characteristically wants to qualify the statement: \u201cIt would be a little grandiose for a writer to declare that she is helping to define anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her last two books, The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians, were a lot more easily called memoirs, though. They each had an emotional hook a publisher could latch on to. The first traced the fallout from Manguso\u2019s diagnosis with a rare autoimmune disease in college, one which left her on a course of steroids for the rest of her life. The second was about the suicide of a composer friend, and the twists and turns of the grief that followed for her.<\/p>\n
Yet when I bring up the word \u201cmemoirist\u201d to Manguso instead, her reaction is immediate: \u201cI don\u2019t love the word.\u201d It\u2019s not that she looks down on memoirists, she says, only that she doesn\u2019t enjoy reproducing anyone\u2019s model. \u201cAnd that sounds a bit like I\u2019m saying I\u2019m so highbrow because I don\u2019t follow conventions. That\u2019s not really it. It\u2019s just that it doesn\u2019t bring me pleasure, to reproduce many conventions.\u201d<\/p>\n
She has a point. Both of her previous books were digressive and epigrammatic, and they they too inspired generic confusion. In fact, a reviewer of The Guardians at the New York Times wrote that it \u201cresembles nothing so much as a certain kind of fiction: the book is so densely webbed by contradiction, rhetorical self-\u00adabnegation, error, Gothic gruesomeness and kooky spirituality that you may finish it feeling as if you\u2019ve spent the time with an unreliable narrator out of Nabokov.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fiction won\u2019t work for Ongoingness, though. So I try another category, one I think of as more open-ended. I ask Manguso about whether she considers herself a poet any more \u2013 she has published two books of poetry. She isn\u2019t completely comfortable with that title either.
\n\u201cWhatever allegiance I had to the title of poet or poetry came from my not being a skilled or experienced enough writer to write very much,\u201d she answers, thoughtfully. \u201cWhich is not to say that I write to length now, 20 years in.\u201d She did do a poetry MFA at the University of Iowa, but as soon as she got in, she says, \u201cI started writing prose. Short prose. And many of those pieces are in my first, so-called poetry collection, which was sort of very gently criticized as containing too many prose poems. And maybe it does, I mean how many is too many?\u201d<\/p>\n
Manguso\u2019s art is poetic, though, in the sense that she manages to pack a lot of meaning into very few words. She has a certain kind of faith in sentences. The title of Ongoingness came from a 2007 profile of the New Yorker writer George WS Trow. It traced the arc of Trow\u2019s career, which was marked by brilliance but eventually disintegrated with his growing mental health issues. It mentions that on a road trip he had told a friend, \u201cThe ongoingness of it is, frankly, a problem.\u201d Manguso never forgot it.<\/p>\n
Is Trow, another epigrammatic and difficult-to-categorise writer, an influence? \u201cTo the extent that that sentence has haunted me ever since I read it, sure.\u201d Manguso is uncomfortable with the language of influence, she says. \u201cBut there are certainly things that were important in awaking and changing my mind. For me it\u2019s usually not like magnum opi or a writer\u2019s entire oeuvre that does that. It\u2019s usually just a sentence, or a passage, or maybe an entire book?\u201d The doubt she attaches to the last item on that list feels very appropriate to a writer whose own oeuvre is a kind of ode to the power of concision.<\/p>\n
stem: michelle dean, sarah manguso
\ntitel: my diary-keeping is a vice
\nbron: the guardian
\nperspectief: her diary is almost a million words long, but her new book, about diary-keeping, includes none of them. It\u2019s typical of this mordantly funny, uncategorisable writer<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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