Praise for Ongoingness :   ""[Manguso is] a Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis, both in the way she distills complex thoughts on time and memory into pure essence and in how she examines writing as a means of control. While Manguso's thoughts are inward, they work outward-from her life to life itself. Read as either a meditative essay or a revealing confessional poem, this is a thoughtful, reflective look at one talented writer's creative evolution." - Kirkus Reviews     "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   "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   "It seemed scarcely possible that, after The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians , Sarah Manguso's work could get more urgent, but somehow it has. Ongoingness confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art. Underwriting this book, as is true of all of Manguso's books, is writing itself. Or, rather, the writing is about itself in the best, most vital sense. Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the most fundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value.

I am in awe." -David Shields   "Sarah Manguso's personal meditation on time and memory begins at the center of a dilemma:  how to let time go by without losing the life it contains. Ongoingness is a diary turned inside out, an answer to the writer's question, 'what do I do with all the words of my life.' It's a quiet argument for letting go and going on." -Lewis Hyde   Praise for Sarah Manguso:   "Rather than taking the route a journalist or detective might pursue to piece together what happened, Manguso plumbs the depths of her memories . Brief but intense, full of startling observations that make you think again about the nature of loss." -Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy, The Guardian   "In brief, almost stanza-like paragraphs, Manguso describes the chronic fear of death-the sort of details sufferers wish to share and readers read such accounts to learn." -Diane Johnson, The New York Review of Books   "Although working within a modest scope, she has created a form to encompass the way life passes: plodding, breathless, and unrelenting.

" - The New Yorker.