The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Sarah Manguso (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 27, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In 1995, when Rome Prize–winning poet and fiction writer Manguso (Siste Viator) was a junior at Harvard, she suffered the first attack of a rare autoimmune disease called CIDP, which would turn her body against itself. CIDP attacks the myelin coating of the peripheral nerves. The result is increasing numbness, followed by paralysis spreading from the extremities inward, until the sufferer can no longer control his or her breathing, and dies. In short, lyrical chapters—the book free-associates between memories, while sticking to a rough chronological order—Manguso recounts the harrowing indignities of her treatments, frequent relapses, descents into steroid-induced clinical depression, crucial college sexual experiences had and missed, and trips back and forth between schools, hospitals and her parents' Massachusetts home. 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: suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the shape and size of a life. (June)
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Review

"Here is a beautiful, brave memoir that takes us into the heart of a young woman's illness, its pains and terrors and mysteries, yet leads us somehow into brightness. For all its clinical precision of the physical, The Two Kinds of Decay is 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. Sarah Manguso is a brilliantly talented writer, and this is a book not to be missed."—John Burnham Schwartz  

“If art can be described as the paths one takes toward some form of compassion, this distilled and luminous book offers us one such a 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

“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

"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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374280126
• ISBN-13: 978-0374280123
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #996,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah Manguso's most recent book is the prose elegy The Guardians (2012). Her memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and was short-listed for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Her other books include the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007), included in in McSweeney's One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box, and the poetry collections Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002), which was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Village Voice. Honors for her writing include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize. A citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Illness Once Removed June 21, 2008

By C. Hutton

Format:Hardcover

Ms. Manguso has written a medically graphic but affecting account of her battle with an auto-immune disease. Written in brief paragraphs with short chapters, the author is clealy recalling a bad dream that she rather not recall. A poet, her writing is lyrical and conversational. Once the reader starts her story, you will not put it down and it is easily read in one sitting. But it is a book that you will come back to.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Journey Through Hell with Humor July 6, 2008

By Michael Chapman

Format:Hardcover

This book is a compelling read. It's a testimony to one woman's resiliance when the terrible thing happens to her, not to some stranger.

Manguso has the courage to revisit her devastating illness, and the wisdom to find the ironies, the lessons, and even the humor in her experience.

Through her sharing of the story of those terrifying sick years, she lets us see the indomitable spirit and the sense of humor that enabled her to survive them and heal.

She juxtaposes pictures of illness against the lyrical beauty of her writing. I find new treasures whenever I reread it.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A painfully, poignantly, poetic, perfect prescription for pity-party participants September 13, 2008

By Julee Rudolf VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Sarah Manguso, afflicted at age twenty-one (in 1995) with a Guillain-Barre-like syndrome called CIDP, wrote The Two Kinds of Decay after seven years of remission from her illness. (p 2) "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 in my life." Of the disease, the reader learns (p 19) "The condition may resolve spontaneously, relapse and remiss indefinitely, or progress and terminate in death." Talk about an uncertain future. In this succinct, simply-written story of a life, Ms. Manguso tells all: of her initial symptoms (numbness in her feet); treatment (and mis) including hours spent undergoing apheresis (p 10) "the process of separating blood into its components" and the painful procedure of having a permanent line surgically implanted in her chest (the apparatus shown on the cover); interactions with hospital staff, friends, family and complete strangers; the effects of the various treatments on her body; and just plain living with a rare, rotten, debilitating condition. Of a doctor, who tries to quantify her high level of suffering, she writes (p 83, 84) "he didn't understand yet that suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the size and shape of a life." Near the end of the book she shares (p 171) "Having spent my twenties expecting to die, I turned thirty and arrived in the afterlife with nothing left to do." She's done a lot since then, notably: running, writing, living and loving. She ends with a line explaining the title (I won't spoil it) and shares what she learned from years of agony, (p 183) "This is suffering's lesson: pay attention." The nine sentences that follow are equally excellent. Also good: Lucky Man by Michael J.... Fox, Mountain Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder and There is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene. Read more ›

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Triumphant. Beautiful. I've read it 4 times. April 10, 2010

By Charli M. Henley

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is an unsentimental and unapologetic memoir of illness. The poetry here left me breathless. The disease Manguso describes is a terrible one, but she weathers it gracefully.

The time line is not a linear one - events in the book take place as if they are just foggy memories and not a plotted story - a realistic and satisfying take on the memoir narrative.

Every word is carefully placed, like an IV or a scalpel. Manguso is a surgeon-poet, wasting nothing. Very precise, very beautiful, very painful.

I've read this book twice now. It was recommended to me by a stranger at a party when I revealed my own recent diagnosis of kidney failure and an autoimmune disease. The book makes me feel hopeful - if she could do it, I can do it. It makes me feel courageous. It offers solidarity in the way few others can - without pity, without tears, without fear. And yet, the book makes me cry.

The story of an illness could be trite. Manguso avoids cliche and does not tell us she has learned to be a better person, that she has found God, or even that she is bitter. She tells us simply that illness forces one to live in and for the moment. While she doesn't herald this epiphany as a triumph, I certainly do.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic memoir; beautiful writing July 16, 2008

By Sanjay H. Patel

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a short book about Sarah Manguso's experience with a strange autoimmune illness, which began suddenly during her freshman year at Harvard. You could easily read it in an afternoon, but it might take longer since there are so many beautiful passages to go back and read again.

She has said that she intentionally did not write about the disease after it began; it must have been too difficult. In reading this book, I got the impression that as she wrote, she was actively rediscovering and redefining her illness and what her life became in the wake of being sick.

Ms. Manguso is an award-winning poet, and the fantastic writing alone is worth the price of admission. The chapters are often only a page or two, the paragraphs only a few lines. The writing is simple and insightful--whether she is discussing a mundane detail, humiliating experience, or a scientific technicality. She is capable of being heartbreaking in one sentence and uplifting in the next.

I should admit that I am a medical student (final year), so perhaps I got a double benefit. Her description of illness is fantastic. If I had learned about this disease from a textbook, it would have been just one of hundreds of cold facts in my brain. But from her description, I began to imagine a mysterious illness that went beyond mere words. I am sure that I now have a better understanding of patients with long-term disease. Moreover, for anyone who has to deal with illness, Sarah Manguso has likely put into words some of the complicated, frustrating feelings that accompany repeat trips to the doctor and hospital.