Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Air date: 
Thu, 04/02/2015 - 11:00am to 11:30am
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso

In her third book, which continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept 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 belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time.
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