“Ongoingness: The End of a Diary”
Sarah Manguso
Graywolf Press, $20
“On the island where my husband grew up and where his mother lived and died, we see a rainbow every day,” Sarah Manguso writes of Hawaii, where rainbows are common but “no less amazing for their prevalence. Ditto birds, trees, stars, clouds, children and so on.”
Manguso’s searching little book about the amazingness of common human experience is the memoir for those who thought they hated memoirs. There’s no over-sharing here.
“Ongoingness: The End of a Diary” is, literally, about Manguso’s terminating her obsessive diary-writing after 25 years. The catalyst was the birth of her first child, which convinced her that it was time to start living rather than trying to capture life on the page.
But this third memoir by poet and fiction writer Manguso is about so much more, including how to deal with anxieties and fears.
One of her first thoughts after she learned she was pregnant was that “the partly made flesh wriggling inside me was already mortal.”
In one of the few actual scenes in this reflective book, her husband is with Manguso in California awaiting the imminent birth of their son while his mother is dying in Hawaii. His “Hi, Mom!” spoken over the phone, when his sister calls from their mother’s bedside, is wrenching.
Later, Manguso reflects, “When the baby was 8 months old, I realized I’d stopped identifying with the man saying ‘Hi, Mom!’ And felt myself becoming the mother who hears him say it, the mother who will someday leave her boy alone.”
“Ongoingness” is not set in Hawaii; nor is Los Angeles, where the couple lives, described very much. The structure is a series of brief vignettes floating through the internal landscape of a new mother whose self is subsumed to her baby’s needs.
But in this thralldom she ultimately finds a new kind of freedom.
“Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments — an inability to accept life as ongoing,” Manguso posits. Spare in words yet generous in spirit, “Ongoingness” grows on you and with you, like life.
