Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
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Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
Introduction
Memoirs serve to provide detailed information about an individual’s experiences from particular life events or occurrences that they wish to share with other people. A person’s memoir may serve different purposes such as encouraging or teaching other members of society through the outlined experiences of the author. The memoir can also function to caution readers against engaging, partaking, or allowing such events to take place in their lives. The successful achievement of the outlined purposes depends on the ability of the author to provide vivid descriptions of the said events or experiences. Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, provides an excellent example of an author’s description of her experience in making entries to her diary across different stages of her life. Unlike other memoirs, the article takes a different approach as it seeks to highlight various elements of writing a person’s diary. The author makes use of various literary devices to develop the article while also highlighting various themes as the text unfolds. Provided herein is a summary of the memoir including its outline, the stylistic devices used in developing the text as well as the analysis of some of the themes presented in the article.
In essence, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary presents a unique style of writing through which the author tries to come to terms with her obsession for recording all the events of her life in her diary. Sarah Manguso has been making entries in her diary for 25 years totaling 800,000 words through her desire and commitment towards capturing every moment or event that takes place every minute or second of her life CITATION Man16 \l 1033 (Manguso, 2016). Sarah Manguso recognizes how long she has taken to develop the 800, 000 words worth of life experiences and events while also introducing some of the reasons behind the habit that has become an essential part of her life. She writes, “I wrote about myself so that I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination— so that I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it,” CITATION Man16 \l 1033 (Manguso, 2016). Failure to write down the day’s account of events as they occurred would lead to a state of confusion and panic as she found it difficult to remember details of the ...