This appeared in today’s book news from Liberty Hardy:
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso
Manguso’s beautiful third book (the other two are also excellent), this time about her desire to keep a diary detailing every single thing that happens to her every day.
And it struck me as another step inward in the literature of self-reflection that has brought us so many memoirs that seem to be the sole accomplishments of their authors, memoirists of a life lived as material for a memoir. Now we have a writer writing about wanting to write about herself (who & which, for all I know, could be fabulous), which harks back to the old schoolkid ploy of writing a paper about having to write a paper. Next: writing about wanting to do something to write about.
