Sarah Manguso’s now released a book of fiction, two of poetry, and, on May 27th from FSG, her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. You are (for now) forgiven if you don’t know who she is: two books of poetry do not, from what I can tell, offer many writers something as tough to come by as name recognition. Her book of fiction, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape is one of the three books that came included in 145 Stories in a Small Box, published by (who else) McSweeney’s (there are more than 145 stories in the box, for the record)(the other two books are by Eggers and Deb Olin Unferth (whose next book is coming from McSweeney’s this fall) and yes, all three books are fantastic, and yes, the set’s worth your money). All of which is just to say: Manguso’s arriving, meaning now, meaning perk up, buy her books, read her and pay attention.
The Two Kinds of Decay is a memoir of what seems to me one of the most fucking brutally nasty diseases ever, a rare, chronic form of Guillain-Barre syndrome called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. I am, for good or bad, squeamish: I get icked out quickly, and I squirm at even physical description of body/health related stuff, and so I cannot say for sure what Guillain-Barre or the CIDP form does to the body, not in any detail. Manguso went from feeling a little bad to not being able to breathe (well or deeply) to not being able to move (much at all), and to discover the malady doctors prodded the shit out of her took tests and ran blood from her body through a machine which removed her platelets and eventually stuck a main line directly into one of her arteries so they (doctors) could take blood whenever they wanted and even writing that now, weeks after reading it, makes me get goosebumpy.
But the just knock-you-on-your-ass part about Manguso’s writing is how unbelievably scrubbed and tough the words are. It’s weird, but the sentence I want to write is that there’s no self-pity in the whole book, and while that’s certainly true, it’s hard to even comprehend the feat of mental strength that’d require. It’s not even worth speculating on whether or not Manguso had why me moments throughout her entire time with this disease (which, by the way, destroyed much of her twenties, and which is incurable, meaning she’s in remission), what’s devastating is her ability to look so coolly at her own life and body and report not even from the frontline, but from within the frontline.
Though there’s a Didion-esque sort of objectivity to Manguso’s writing, there are moments of gut-wrenching, real basic human stuff that just floors you and jolts you to the realization that, yes, you’re reading about a body that went through an atrocious, hideous thing, but you’re also very much reading about a human being, a life. It sounds stupid to write it like that, or it feels stupid anyway: we sort of know this stuff, intellectually, but when you get to, for instance, the moment in the book in which Manguso describes one of her nurses marking on a form that Manguso’s color is naturally pale (the details of the scene are not easily compressible, plus just read the book—it’s page 78-79), a moment of real basic person-to-person generosity and connection, it’s enough to make you weep. No joke at all.
Manguso’s sentences are compact and scarily shining, and the structure of the book fits her writing perfectly. Chapters are short—a few paragraphs to a handful of pages—and the chapters are blocks of text, independent, disconnected. What’s most incredible, I think, about the structure is how Manguso basically allows/forces the reader to connect the text her- or himself, and how that feeling of agency brings (I think) the reader in incredibly closely to a story she/he/(very much I) might otherwise try to keep some distance from.
This book’s gonna/should get rapturous praise, and, yes, it’ll deserve every word. It’s a demanding book, and it’ll (likely) make you physically uncomfortable. Much more important is that the book’s astoundingly beautifully written and is almost freakishly wise and has more guts and heart than any other two dozen books I can think of off the top of my head. Read it and, if you’re the sort of person who does this stuff, pray for Manguso and for readers: that she stays well and that she keeps writing and that we get to keep reading.
