Ongoingness

After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time--about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.Miranda July

Written without vanity, Ongoingness is a sparse, poignant essay on mortality, memory and transience, and how her experience of these has changed after motherhood.Financial Times

The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingness is a short book but there's nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit.Jenny Offill

Using placid, plainspoken speech, Ongoingness 'sees through the surface to the depths,' as Virginia Woolf, another time-traveler, once put it. Manguso’s alchemy here is to turn an homage to missing excess (her unprinted diary) into a work suffused with its own fullness and gravityMaggie Nelson