'The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingness is a short book butthere's nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit.' Jenny Offill '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.' Miranda July ' Ongoingness confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art .

Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the mos. tfundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value. I am in awe.' David Shields 'Bold, elegant, and honest . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict's testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.' Paris Review 'Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.' Maria Popova.