 The Two Kinds of Decay: a memoir
Sarah Manguso
ISBN: 9780980517927
B format hardback, 192pp
RRP: $27.95
Memoir/ Literature
Pub Date: 29th September, 2008
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
New York Post Required Reading
San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick
Publishers Weekly starred review
‘Manguso has produced a remarkable, clear-eyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful.’—New York Times Book Review
AT TWENTY-ONE, the poet Sarah Manguso developed a neurological disease so rare it didn’t even have a real name. A wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, vanishing and then returning, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything.
In this captivating memoir, Manguso recounts her nine-year struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst 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, self-awareness and dark humour to train our eyes anew on the meaning of illness and survival.
The Two Kinds of Decay alternates elegantly between moments of acute intimacy and extraordinary detachment as Sarah Manguso looks back at the plight of her own body, laboring under pain and illness, with honesty, biting intelligence, and unsentimental wit. Written in surgically precise prose, with a poet’s eye for brevity, this is an unusually beautiful and powerful memoir .
Sarah Manguso is the author of the short story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s 2007) and two books of poetry,
Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her website at www.sarahmanguso.com | 
