Ongoingness

Sarah Manguso can measure her life in words. The poet and memoirist kept a diary for 25 years, writing roughly 800,000 verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs… but over those decades of daily diary entries, the freedom from forgetting all the details of life began to feel more like a prison. We heard yesterday from novelist Heidi Julavitz about how the diary form gave her the structure she needed to go wild with her new memoir, The Folded Clock. Today, we get a different perspective on the diary.