In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for 25 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 miss something important. Then Manguso became pregnant & had a child, & these Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary-a haunting account of mortality & impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around & over & through us.

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