Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Manguso (Ongoingness) continues her fragmentary approach to autobiography with this inventive book of aphorisms and memories. All of life's great subjects are here-love, relationships, happiness, desire, and vulnerability on the personal side; effort, luck, envy, and success vs. failure on the professional side-in one- and two-sentence nuggets of compressed insight. Many of the sayings sound like updated versions of traditional proverbs ("Inner beauty can fade, too" and "Choose one: chronic disappointment or lowering your expectations"); their authoritativeness contrasts with the author's professed uncertainty about how she's doing as a wife, mother, and writer. Parallel constructions, contradictions, and mathematical propositions ("It takes x hours to write a book") come closest to the title's connotation of rhetorical arguments. Arguably, pretentiousness sometimes masquerades as profundity here, and, like a comedy set composed entirely of one-liners, the book contains almost too much to take in at once. The pithy format tricks readers into skimming quickly, but it will require multiple rereadings to absorb the book's rewarding wisdom. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A writer's life, solitary and complex, broken apartnot into shards but puzzle pieces.In Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015), poet and essayist Manguso assessed her life as a writer and mother with the greatest economy of means. In her latest, she goes a step further. "Think of this as a short book, she advises, rather late in the book, composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages." At first glance, it seems like a collection of off-kilter Thoughts for the Day. There are pithy aphorisms: "Inner beauty can fade, too"; dark, reflective thoughts: Preferable to accepting ones insignificance is imagining the others hate you; purely personal confessions of sexual despair: There are people I wanted so much before I had them that the entire experience of having them was grief for my old hunger. These seemingly random and casual assertions subtly form a kind of loose story, that of a writer, academic, and mother at midlife wondering how the win-loss record might add upand on which side this particular book might fall. Ive written whole books to avoid writing other books, she confesses at one point, suggesting a failure of ambition. Some pages later she seems to feel at a loss: I wish someone would tell me what I should be doing instead of this, that hed be right, and that Id believe him. Self-doubt becomes part of a larger, more evocative struggleto keep going, keep writing, and leave evidence of having lived: On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here. A slim, poetic self-portrait that opens up as you read it and stays in the mind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
