- Published: 07/06/2012
- ISBN: 9781847085573
- Granta Books
- 128 pages
The Guardians
Sarah Manguso
In 2008, one of Sarah Manguso’s oldest friends discharged himself from a New York City psychiatric hospital and threw himself in front of a train; the last ten hours of his life are unaccounted for. In this new memoir, Manguso continues her attention to illness, suffering, and time’s relentless forward momentum, which prevents total recovery from grief. As she did brilliantly in her first memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay, Manguso explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything at all.
£8.99
A moving elegy that also happens to be an original, probing, shiningly intelligent work of literature
James Lasdun
A moving, personal account of Harris' death, and the confusion, disillusionment, guilt and grief that accompany it. The Guardians is... a comment on the fleeting, relentless and unpredictable nature of existence
Naomi Polonsky, Evening Standard
An ode to the known and the unknown, to intimacy in life and separation in death and simply to the death of a friend... a masterpiece.
Iain Finlayson, The Times
From the Same Author
The Two Kinds of Decay
Sarah Manguso
At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralysing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, depression, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and humour, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an account of illness can and should be.
£8.99
Sarah Manguso on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
My Body
Sarah Manguso
‘When I was twenty-one I became a citizen of the hospital.’
