{"product_id":"ongoingness-the-end-of-a-diary","title":"Ongoingness: The End of a Diary: The End of a Diary","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn't realize we needed.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eOngoingness\u003c\/i\u003e, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. \"I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,\" she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThen Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eOngoingness\u003c\/i\u003e is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary--it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Bold, elegant, and honest . . . \u003ci\u003eOngoingness\u003c\/i\u003e reads variously as an addict's testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.\" --Maria Popova, \u003ci\u003e Brain Pickings\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Graywolf Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53558915596654,"sku":"9781555977658","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0984\/1007\/0382\/files\/imageloader_f70b5e8d-911d-4d9f-b102-3db9de8d6dcb.jpg?v=1774624445","url":"https:\/\/tenderbuttonsbooks.com\/products\/ongoingness-the-end-of-a-diary","provider":"Tender Buttons Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}