The Two Kinds of Decay

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The Two Kinds of Decay (eBook - First Edition) Pub. Date: 5/26/2009 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir Pub. Date: 5/26/2009 Publisher: Picador
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The Two Kinds of Decay (First Edition) Pub. Date: 5/27/2008 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Overview

The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.

At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: 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 story, Manguso recalls 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. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.

What People Are Saying

In The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah 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 Story of a Marriage

At the white-hot center of this book burns the intelligence and wit of Sarah Manguso, one of the most brilliantly talented writers at work today. She is a clear-eyed visionary, a connoisseur of the penetrating declarative, an unsentimental chronicler of the horrifying insult of illness and of the desires that drive us headlong into adulthood. With a poet's brevity, with riveting narrative energy, with searing insight and compassion, Manguso leads us into hell and back again; every step of the way, there's the thrill of knowing we're in the hands of a new literary master. --Julie Orringer, author of How to Breathe Underwater

Editorial Reviews

Emily Mitchell

The author of two books of poetry, Manguso brings the virtues of that form to the task of writing memoir. Her book is divided mostly into one- and two-page chapters titled like poems. She mixes high and low language, the crass and the scientific, with a lyric poet's sure-handedness. The chapters themselves…resemble her own poetry, broken into aphoristic, discrete sections on the page. This disjointedness gives the prose a rhythm that mirrors the confusion and fragmentation of illness…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, cleareyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful.
—The New York Times

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

From The Critics

Hers is not a day-by-day description of this grueling time, but an impressionistic text filled with bright, poetic flashes. The use of such terms as "spacetime" at the start of the book is a little off-putting, but before long Manguso has earned them: She is attempting, after all, to give form to a vast, formless and terrifying experience. Many sick people learn to live in the moment, but the power of Manguso's writing makes that truism revelatory.
—The Washington Post

The Barnes & Noble Review

Acclaimed poet Sarah Manguso thought she was suffering from a weeks-long head cold during her junior year at Harvard in 1995, before tingling, numbness, and shortness of breath suggested something more mysterious -- and dire. She soon found herself in the intensive care unit of the local hospital, where they administered the first of 50 rounds of aphersis, an excruciating four-hour process of removing and replacing toxic components in the blood. Thus began Manguso's nine-year battle with a disease so rare it has no name. Its closest approximation is "chronic idiophathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy" -- in other words, her immune system was decimating her nervous system. With spare, precise prose, gallows humor, and piercing observation, Manguso seizes and artfully organizes shards of memories of paralysis, breathlessness, extreme pain, and terror. She "grew used to being sick and looking forward to recovering" only to become "used to having no prognosis at all, because with a mysterious disease, all things are possible." Manguso masterfully evokes her yearnings to indulge her 20-something appetites (e.g., sex and alcohol) while instead forced to confront mortality -- enduring misdiagnoses and interminable hospital stays, encounters with former classmates turned nurses, and the death of a former lover. The Two Kinds of Decay is an indelible meditation on remembering what one longs to forget, by a woman emerging from the exile of illness. --Kera Bolonik

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374280123
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 5/27/2008
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 5.74 (w) x 8.38 (h) x 0.74 (d)

Meet the Author

Sarah Manguso is the author of two books of poetry, Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, and the short story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape.

Read an Excerpt

The Beginning

The disease has been in remission seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember.

For seven years I tried not to remember much because there was too much to remember, and I didn’t want to fall any further behind with the events of my life. I still don’t have a vegetable garden. I still haven’t been to France. I have gone to bed with enough people that they seem like actual people now, but while I was going to bed with them I thought I was catching up. I am sorry. I had lost what seemed like a lot of time.

I waited seven years to forget just enough—so that when I tried to remember, I could do it thoroughly. There are only a few things to remember now, and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.

I wrote down some things while the disease was happening—there are notes from one hospital stay and a few notes from the sickest years—but it isn’t much.

Sometimes I think the content of those days might not have finished happening. It might have begun then, in 1995, but I needed to save the rest of it until I was stronger.

The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of spacetime, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.

Reading Group Guide

Questions for Discussion
1. In her closing lines, the author writes, "There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else's." What other allusions lie in the book's title? What kinds of decay are evident in Sarah Manguso's memories, and in all confrontations with mortality? What kinds of regeneration also take place in such circumstances?

2. Discuss the special traits of this memoir's form, such as the author's use of text blocks, one-sentence paragraphs, and brief but dense chapters. What makes her use of a unique structure appropriate for the topic? In what way is Manguso's skill as a prizewinning poet evident in her prose?

3. One aspect of Manguso's illness is isolation. How do her relationships with other people -- medical professionals, family, lovers -- change throughout the near-decade of her illness? How do their perceptions of her change? Is illness always ultimately a solitary experience?

4. One of the defining traits of Manguso's illness is its shifting definitions. What are the challenges and advantages of facing an illness that has neither a firm diagnosis nor a prognosis?

5. How was the author affected by the time of life during which her symptoms first appeared? What transitions are specific to a twenty-one-year-old? How did your own circumstances at that age compare to hers?

6. Discuss the conundrums presented in "Causation," beginning on page 21. What do these questions indicate about the nature of suffering in general? To what degree do they mirror Catch-22, a book Manguso admires tremendously (and whose author faced the same diagnosis)?

7. How was the author shaped by being a public school girl at an elite private college? What do her observations about class, "determined not by schools or money but by family," reveal about the worlds she inhabited growing up? What were the essential components of her identity before the illness, and afterward?

8. To what extent does the author weave notions of sex and death? What deeply human responses were captured in her "superstition sex" with Victor? How do her thoughts on beauty relate to her other observations about the body and perfection (or imperfection)?

9. Manguso encountered a wide variety of health-care providers throughout her treatment, from nurses and hematologists to physical therapists and neurologists. What do her recollections demonstrate about good caregivers and bad ones?

10. What ironies and images are embedded in the nature of CIDP, in which patients' blood becomes both a necessity and a threat? How did Manguso capture the impact of her treatment procedures and their metaphors?

11. How does the author's depiction of her depression differ from other memoirs on this topic? How did she cope with the tandem of depression's physical and psychological roots? What emotional progression is marked by the book's varying landscapes, from the East Coast to Iowa and back again?

12. Manguso describes the onset of her addiction to tranquilizers in "Fear and Fright" (pages 76 to 77). Is there any meaningful distinction between someone who becomes addicted to tranquilizers as the result of a painful physical illness and an addict who has experienced no physical illness? Is there any meaningful distinction between those who are addicted to prescription drugs and those who are addicted to illegal drugs, or to alcohol, or to cigarettes, or to food?

13. On page 107 in "Attention," the author writes that one gamma globulin infusion cost her health insurance company thirty-five thousand dollars. Discuss the practical aspects of her treatment and what they illustrate about health care in the United States.

14. In the last chapter, Manguso urges readers to pay attention. "This is suffering's lesson," she tells us. In the past, has suffering sharpened or dulled your ability to pay attention? What could suffering allow you to notice, if you let it?

15. Discuss the most unsettling episodes of your life. How did you navigate uncertainty and confront deep-seated fears? Think about what you will take with you from Manguso's approach to memory and survival: "You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness, into brightness."

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The Two Kinds of Decay

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Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Emily Mitchell

From The Critics

The Barnes & Noble Review

Product Details

Meet the Author

Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide