Dear Diary: Sarah Manguso Reviewed at The New Yorker

At The New Yorker, Alice Gregory writes about poet and essayist Sarah Manguso, and her newest work, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, in which Manguso confronts the "dark matter"--the 8,000-page diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I envisioned a book without a single quote, a book about pure states of being,” quotes Gregory. “It sounded almost religious when I put it that way.” More:

The memoir, rather than being a synopsis of the life recorded by the diary, is mostly a set of meditations on the fact of the diary’s existence. The tone is matter-of-fact, and the controlled, even staid sentences seem deliberately to reject the manic, melodramatic quality of a diary. The book proceeds in sparse, aphoristic fragments, almost like prose poems. None are longer than a page, and some are just a single sentence:

I started keeping the diary in earnest when I started finding myself in moments that were too full.

At an art opening in the late eighties, I held a plastic cup of wine and stood in front of a painting next to a friend I loved. It was all too much.

I stayed partly contained in the moment until that night, when I wrote down everything that had happened and everything I remembered thinking while it happened and everything I thought while recording what I remembered had happened…

There should be extra days, buffer days, between the real days.

Manguso seldom divulges any particularly sensitive information, and yet her material is, in a sense, vastly more intimate than what we usually think of as private. She picks at the places where language butts up against the inexpressible. Her currency is the “henid,” the philosopher Otto Weininger’s term for the half-formed thought. Her impressions, while lucid, are true to the gauziness of mental life as we experience it. “Ongoingness” is an attempt to take, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “a token of some real thing behind appearances” and “make it real by putting it into words.” It’s hard to think of a more perilous way to write.

Read more of this piece, "Dear Diary, I Hate You," at The New Yorker.