Sign-In
Cart
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
Audio Book
Biographies GeneralLetters & Essays
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Tantor
Published: Mar 31 2026
Language: English
[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn't realize we needed. ―The New Yorker
In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she 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 eight hundred thousand 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.
Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary―it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us.
Bold, elegant, and honest ... Ongoingness reads variously as an addict's testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy. ―The Paris Review
2 different editions
Also available
Also from
Manguso, Sarah
One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box: Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies
Manguso, Sarah
Eggers, Dave
Olin Unferth, Deb
Hardcover
Also in
Letters & Essays
Essays V2: Moral And Entertaining On The Various Faculties And Passions Of The Human Mind (1815)
Clarendon, Edward Hyde Earl of
Paperback
Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Sez I to Myself: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt
McCourt, Malachy
McCourt, Frank
Hardcover
But Have You Read the Book? Romance Edition: 40 Love Stories That Inspired Our Favorite Films
Lopez, Kristen
Hardcover
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee
Paperback
Wonder Is a Lovely Place to Be: 365 Days of Wit, Wisdom, and Irrepressible Imagination
Doyle, Brian
Hardcover
Little Apocalypses: Essays on Motherhood, Climate Change, and Hope at the End of the World
Teer, Kaitlyn
Paperback
Corazón Migrante. Ensayos Sobre Lo Que No Puedo Olvidar / Migrant Heart: Essays on What I Cannot Forget
Grande, Reyna
Paperback
异乡故人（壹嘉-人文）
刘宗坤
Paperback
Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian
Volf, Miroslav
Wiman, Christian
Hardcover
Wonderbook (Revised and Expanded): The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction
VanderMeer, Jeff
Paperback
Love in the Afternoon, and Evening: Essays and Conversations on Soap Operas
Druckman, Charlotte
Sen, Mayukh
Paperback
Gilmore Girls: The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge: The Official Guide to All the Books
Berlin, Erika
Hardcover
Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, 1944-1959
Camus, Albert
Hardcover