![]() ![]() In her memoir, Manguso makes the striking decision never to quote the diary itself. She reports that, after finding that she’d recorded “nothing of consequence” in 1996, she “threw the year away.” Looking back at entries fills her with embarrassment and occasionally even indifference. “There’s no reason to continue writing other than that I started writing at some point-and that, at some other point, I’ll stop,” she writes. But she seems genuinely not proud of the diary. Careful to preëmpt criticism that her project is fey or vainglorious, she characterizes her diary habit as “a vice,” and points out that it has taken the place of “exercise, performing remunerative work, or volunteering my time to the unlucky.” Of all the psychological conditions to be burdened with, graphomania is hardly the worst, and Manguso doesn’t quite succeed in dispelling the suspicion that she is a little proud of her eccentricities, perhaps even exaggerating them. “It’s eight hundred thousand words long.” And the memoir, a kind of meta-diary, is her attempt to interrogate her obsessive drive to maintain a record of her existence. “I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago,” Manguso writes. The journal, first envisioned as an amulet against the passage of time, has grown to overwhelming proportions. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.” “I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention,” she tells us early in her memoir “Ongoingness” (Graywolf). What could be more worth remembering than one’s own life? Is there a good excuse for forgetting even a single day? Something like this anxiety seems to have prompted the poet and essayist Sarah Manguso, on the cusp of adulthood, to begin writing a journal, which she has kept ever since. I suspect that many people who don’t keep a diary worry that they ought to, and that, for some, the failure to do so is a source of fathomless self-loathing. ![]() Sarah Manguso Illustration by Montse Bernal / Reference: Andy Ryan
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