Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

This short, unconventional memoir is an account of Sarah Manguso’s meticulously kept diary: eight hundred thousand words written over twenty-five years. I am fascinated by people who keep daily records of their lives, though I’m intrigued by the process more than the product. Ongoingness doesn’t include a single excerpt from Manguso’s diary, but rather describes the author’s compulsion to write, “to retain the whole memory” of her life. It is a meditation on memory: remembering, and forgetting, as well as a confession of what it is to be human. Despite the fact that I don’t journal obsessively or even daily, I found this book to be deeply resonant; if I’d have highlighted each passage that captivated me, most of its pages would now be yellow.