The Two Kinds of Decay
by Sarah Manguso
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008
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New York Times Sunday Book Review Editors' Choice
New York Post "Required Reading"
At twenty-one, Sarah Manguso was faced with a disease that appeared suddenly
and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect
nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. She recounts her nine-year struggle
with collapsed veins, addiction and depression, and perhaps the unkindest cut of all for a writer—the trite metaphors
that accompany prolonged illness. Ultimately, though, hers is not so much a chronicle of triumph or
tragedy as it is simply a story about learning to pay attention. And in so doing, she manages
with tremendous grace and self-awareness to train our eyes anew on the very notion of illness and survival.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux catalog
As much as anything, this book is a search for adequate descriptions of things heretofore unnamed
and unknown. Manguso concludes her account with questions—and an exhortation to the reader to
pay attention. Through her own attentiveness, Manguso has produced a remarkable, clear-eyed
account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful.
Emily Mitchell, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
What makes this lightning-quick book extraordinary is not just Manguso's
deadpan delivery of often unthinkable details, nor her poet's struggle with the damaging metaphors
of disease, but the compassion she acquires as she comes to understand her pain in relation to
the pain of others.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Manguso's abundant analytic and compositional gifts are evident throughout this harrowing memoir,
from her expressions of hard-won appreciation for the relativity of suffering to a nuanced account
of how serious illness can alter one's conception of time, robbing the afflicted of both compassion
and accurate recall. A powerful, direct examination of memory and suffering.
Kirkus Reviews
Manguso writes this account from the far end of the illness, looking back on it from a position
of physical strength, biting ferocity, and unsentimental wit.
Wendy Lesser, Bookforum
Her slender volume is written in a sparse, no-nonsense style that can be chilling but make
you cheer for the author.
Billy Heller, The New York Post
Contrary to the usual cliché, illness did not make Manguso a better person. It made her a more
thoughtful, self-aware person. In simple, unsentimental language, she describes her initial symptoms,
her sudden attacks, her treatments, her suicidal depression, and her progress as a patient and,
incidentally, as a person.
Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe
This is not a "rah-rah" survivor story, but a brutal tale told with black humor about Manguso's
refusal to capitulate to a devastating disease. It is a story about infected chest tubes, experimental
drug protocols, sex as a lifesaving measure, and a fierce woman coming back from an absolute physical
collapse.
Dylan Foley, The New Jersey Star-Ledger
Stunning... Manguso's deadpan tone works equally well in service of the painful and funny moments,
or when the two meet.
Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
An unsentimental exploration of the author's experience with a mysterious and prolonged illness.
Manguso's clear-eyed treatment of the subject matter elevates it from the ranks of the conventional
"illness memoir,' but her spare prose style is what makes this book so remarkable.
Meehan Crist, Critical Mass
Memory and awareness are the tools Sarah Manguso uses to craft this astonishing memoir.
By frankly stating what her human body endured, she sheds light on the intangible experiences
of illness and the importance of paying attention to the decay and truth of the actual present.
J. Wells, Booknotes
Manguso's story is a particularly compelling reminder of mortality and the isolation and
loss imposed by an illness that doesn't follow the rules. But what makes it really stand out
amid the glut of other illness memoirs is the author's literary talent.
Library Journal
Graceful, wrenching, elegant. But while Manguso's is a familiar kind of story, it's full
of wisdom and horror that are uniquely its own. With her strong, simple prose, Manguso...
pays attention to the times when words can't do enough.
Eryn Loeb, The L Magazine
Does a purse snatcher sit on a bench reading the latest Sarah Manguso book? Do you think that
when inmates go to the prison library, they ask for Sarah Manguso? I doubt it.
Garrison Keillor, author of Lake Wobegon Days
The autoimmune malady prompts writerly metaphors, observations, and much more in Manguso's
wrenching yet fascinating account of a nine-year struggle now seven years of remission
behind her.
Whitney Scott, Booklist
An impressive display of inquisitive memory, a treatise on being young and sick
and a testament to the importance of truly paying attention. ... Manguso has already
emerged as an "exciting literary talent." Decay simply further affirms she
deserves such a title.
Nate Martin, Stop Smiling Magazine
The just knock-you-on-your-ass part about Manguso's writing is how unbelievably scrubbed
and tough the words are. There's no self-pity in the whole book...
it's hard to even comprehend the feat of mental strength that'd require.
Weston Cutter, Corduroy Books
Part of what makes The Two Kinds of Decay unusual is Manguso's impatience with failures of
comprehension. ... Manguso's use of this compressed form is masterful, mainly because she crams a lot
of sly complexity into the speaker's own voice.
Ron Slate, On the Seawall
The Two Kinds of Decay veers through epigrammatic writing, self-effacing philosophy,
and haiku-prose. In all cases, Manguso's writing is truly unique; she can impact with one
sentence what most authors can only hope for in a paragraph.
Adam Krefman, Smith Magazine
We gain just what we want from a memoir: Not self-pity. Not self-aggrandizement. Only what we
need—the reality, the truth, told with all the efficiency and honesty possible.
Daniel Torday, The Kenyon Review Online
Each sentence is a marvel, put together painstakingly to extract maximum meaning.
Manguso strips everything away to reveal the terror, the pain, the numbness and even
the beauty of the rare disease that, years after her initial bouts, still has the power
to strike when it decides, not when she does. This is how you write a memoir.
Sarah Weinman, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
As merger of medical back roads and privacy violated, Manguso's report to HQ on
the toll is lucid, beautiful, and tangibly a matter of hurt.
Christopher Winner, The American (Italy)
If art can be described as the path one takes toward some form of compassion,
this distilled and luminous book offers us one such map. An exploration of a body
at a particular moment in its history, narrated by an unsparing yet appealing consciousness,
The Two Kinds of Decay brings the reader to a place of grace and compassion
that is absolutely breathtaking.
Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
I will eat my hat if this book does not win a lot of prizes and sell a lot of copies.
It should be on writing class syllabi and on medical school syllabi and generally just
pressed into the hands of everyone I know.
Jenny Davidson, author of Heredity
In The Two Kinds of Decay, Manguso has miraculously elevated
the act of memory. She has found honesty, fear, longing, and beauty in every
moment of her young life, giving this book an intensity found nowhere else. You
put it down panting with wonder and grief, but never with pity. A breakthrough
in the memoir, and in writing.
Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
The book is distinctive... for its decidedly unsensational quality. Her sharing
of these things is profoundly calm and, at time, unsettlingly direct.
Mary Gannon, Poets & Writers
One of the most movingly humane books
I have read in a long time; it is a hard-earned vision of life, every word
grounded in both body and soul.
John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner
At the white-hot center of this book burns the intelligence and wit
of Sarah Manguso. With a poet's brevity,
with riveting narrative energy, with searing insight and compassion,
Manguso leads us into hell and back again.
Julie Orringer, author of How to Breathe Underwater
