The Two Kinds of Decay
Feb 2011 · Granta
5.0star
1 reviewreport
Ebook
192
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
Ratings and reviews
5.0
1 review
Peter Toth
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November 21, 2023
One of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Extraordinary!
About the author
Sarah Manguso is an American writer and poet. Her short story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007), was included with story collections by Dave Eggers and Deb Olin Unferth in McSweeney's One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box. Her poetry collections are Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002). Her poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New Republic, the Paris Review, the Pushcart Prize annual, and three volumes of the Best American Poetry series. Honours for her writing include a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize. She has served on the faculty of the graduate writing programs at Columbia and the New School. She lives in Brooklyn.
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