McCrary Reviews Sarah Manguso’s ‘Ongoingness: The End of a Diary’

Creative Writing graduate student Micah McCrary wrote “Review of Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary” in Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog.

Micah McCrary

McCrary is a doctoral student in the Creative Writing program at Ohio University.

I tried to keep my first diary during junior high, a diary which I began under lock and key and ended with a trip to the garbage can. I tried again in college, and then again while studying abroad, and to this day—aided by garbage cans and bonfires—there’s no existing firsthand account of my quotidian experience.

As a reader, though, my relationship with the diary has been something else. When a friend asked what I wanted for Christmas this past year, I told her I’d been meaning for a while to read Virginia Woolf’s diary. I love Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary. I adore Reborn: Journals and Notebooks by Susan Sontag. And I hope to one day teach Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl to my own students. While I’m afraid to produce diaries, consuming them is another thing altogether.

Read the rest of McCrary’s review in Brevity.