Sarah Manguso kept a meticulous diary 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, of eight hundred thousand words, became a daily attempt to remember, to fix the passage of time.
Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two events caused a monumental shift that changed her relationship to time and to mortality, and also to her diary.
Ongoingness is a beautiful, daring, honest and shifting work that grapples with writing, motherhood and time.
