Ongoingness : the End of a Diary

'This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire.' Zadie Smith 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 conceals a terror that she might miss out something important. Maintaining that diary became a daily attempt to remember every detail, to stop the passage of time. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two events slowly and irrevocably changed her relationship to her life and also to her diary. In this moving memoir Sarah Manguso confesses her life long struggle to let go. Ongoingness is a beautiful, daring and honest and shifting work that grapples with writing and motherhood.