It was not like that.
The collection was hopelessly arbitrary. I realized I’d have to read the diary many more times to ensure I was collecting the best excerpts, and many more times after that, once a form began to flicker in the collection’s murk, and I knew I didn’t have the time or the stomach for that. Just rereading my adolescent townie disapproval of the first twenty days of college was enough to make me want to tear out the chips or transistors or whatever it is in a computer that makes it remember things.
My troublingly arbitrary collection strategy was no less arbitrary than any arbitrarily systematic plan—for example, collecting the fourteenth day of every month or the first sentence of every thousand. The arbitrariness bothered me, not knowing whether I’d chosen the best bits, if indeed there were any that could be designated as such.
But the even greater problem was that no individual diary entry had been written to make sense by itself. It led neither away from the previous day nor toward the following day. It possessed no form separate from the greater form, which itself was almost formless—which itself was just accumulation, just day after day after day after day.
Imagine a biography that includes not just a narrative but also all the events that failed to foreshadow. Most of what the diary includes foreshadows nothing. Most of what it includes happens in the present and disappears. (Did I mention that I write the diary in present tense? I do.)
The threat of writing to an audience becomes only more present a danger as time passes and one’s audience increases, I once wrote and believed. And forgot. And read again, and now believe again.
The only thing I ever wrote that wasn’t for an audience was the diary.
I could excerpt and revise maybe a year or two as a standalone piece of writing, but to include a year or two (which years would I choose?) would only distract from Ongoingness, which is about the whole thing, not just a couple of years. Not just the best parts. It’s about the diary as a single item, an indivisible behemoth of English prose.
I decided that the only way to represent the diary in this book would be either to include the entire thing untouched—which would have required an additional eight thousand pages—or to include none of it.
I didn’t know how to present to an audience a document that had been written for no audience, and I knew I couldn’t ask my editor to edit an almost-million-word document possessing no goals regarding coherence or form.
The only way I could include my diary in this book about my diary, then, was to refer to it and then continue on.
Imagine it as dark matter or as one of the sixty-seven confirmed moons of Jupiter or whatever real thing you nonetheless must take on faith.
April 2014
Los Angeles
Acknowledgments
To Jim Behrle, Meghan Cleary, Kayla Gillespie, Sheila Heti, Chelsea Hodson, Jennifer L. Knox, Irene Lusztig, Frank Manguso, Judith Manguso, PJ Mark, Ted Mulkerin, Maggie Nelson, Ethan Nosowsky and everyone at Graywolf, Julie Orringer, Martha Ronk, Mirtha Santizo, David Shields, Zadie Smith, Marya Spence, Lorin Stein, Noelitta Tailiam, Antoine Wilson, Dean Young, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and Adam Chapman, to whom this work is dedicated—my ongoing gratitude.
SARAH MANGUSO is the author, most recently, of The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend, named one of the top ten books of 2012 by Salon. Her previous book, the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay, was named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out Chicago. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, and her poems have been included in four editions of the Best American Poetry series. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize. Born and raised near Boston, she now lives in Los Angeles.
Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Edwards Brothers Malloy on acid-free, 100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
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