One of the first lessons I learned in my writing classes was that writing about writing is not engaging to anyone except the author. Yet, when you find a piece about writing that’s not vain, pompous, masturbatory, but actually meaningful, actually open and honest and important, it’s hard not to be impressed.
In Sarah Manguso’s extended essay, Ongoingness:The End of a Diary, the author writes a meditation on the diary she has kept for 25 years, all without including a single quote. The result is a stunning look back on the writings she kept for years, the notes she took furiously in an attempt to mark down her days, to keep them real in some place beside her mind.
Kati Heng: With a diary that’s almost 1,000,000 words long, you seem like the person to go to for diary-keeping advice! Can you give us any tips?
Sarah Manguso: If the goal is to write a lot, I’m the wrong person to ask—a million words in 25 years isn’t much. It’s about a hundred words a day.
KH: Your book is called Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Why did you decide to call it “The End?”
SM: The book describes the end of the anxiety that impelled me to keep the diary for 25 years. I still keep the diary, but the original anxiety is gone.
KH: Can you tell me more about that anxiety?
SM: Here’s how I put it in the book: I wrote about myself so I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it. // More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it. // Imagining life without the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be dead.
KH: How often do you reread old diary passages? What’s your usual habit of doing so?
SM: I do it casually, grazing up the document toward earlier days, weeks, months. And every once in a long while, I’ll go back years and see what today’s date was like a decade ago.
KH: How much do you typically write in one diary passage?
SM: I used to write more than I do now, but over the past few years my average has been about 90 words per day.
KH: I loved the way you talk about how, through motherhood, your diary has become less of your story and more of your son’s. It’s a great metaphor, I think (as a non-parent) about how motherhood shifts one’s focus from one’s own life to that of one’s child, but maybe I’m misinterpreting that? I guess I’m asking, as a non-parent, is that what happens? And what does it feel like?
SM: Before I was a mother I assumed that motherhood would feel like an instantaneous substitution of my child’s life for my own. In Ongoingness I explain how motherhood changed and deepened my awareness of time. I both forgot and remembered more than I thought I could. Those experiences made my diary less crucial and less potent.
KH: Miranda July praised your book! How does that feel?
SM: Extremely gratifying, as she is a genius.
KH: Any new projects in the works?
SM: My next book, Three Hundred Arguments, is forthcoming from Graywolf next year.
KH: What’s on your bookshelves? What are your bookshelves like? Do you alphabetize? How do you sort books?
SM: I used to sort by genre, then alphabetize within genre… and then about three moves ago, I gave up and just put the books in the shelves willy-nilly, and now it’s a pleasure to have to browse in order to locate something. Sometimes I find something by surprise, as one does in front of a stranger’s bookcase.
KH: What have you had on your shelf since you were 14?
SM: My old double-faced edition of Grimm’s and Anderson’s fairy tales. Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd. An edition of Facts About the Presidents from the sixties. An edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from probably even earlier.
KH: What are you constantly drawing from?
SM: Many short passages from many books, songs, and films that I love and know by heart.
