And then when he was quite young, not one year old yet, I began having these moments in which extremely detailed preverbal sense memories of my own infancy returned. I would be hanging out with this little preverbal creature, and, to maybe romanticize it slightly too much, it seemed as if my brain was trying to help me relate to or communicate with this preverbal creature by reminding me of what it had seemed like to be a preverbal creature. In the book I talk about this incredibly detailed sense memory of a panel on the inside of my crib that was orange, there were all these little cranks and buttons to push and turn and play with, and there were visual and tactile and audible components to this memory. And there were several other early childhood memories that kind of came up for the first time in my life that I had remembered.

I was simultaneously forgetting more than I ever thought I could survive forgetting and remembering more than I ever thought I would. And it just became clear to me that my experience of memory and self and time were not as I thought they had been. I guess pregnancy and motherhood were triggers for a new understanding of the position of the self in time.

Beck: What was your understanding of it before versus after?

Manguso: Before, I thought I would simply record everything that happened to me during a day and kind of upload it to the diary and that would prevent my living thoughtlessly. It would enable me to live thoughtfully always. And I took for granted that I would just remember everything in time to write it down and I also took for granted that I’d probably forget everything after I recorded it. It became clear to me that neither of those two assumptions were correct.

Beck: You wrote in Ongoingness that for you, diary-keeping was a vice, not a virtue. Why do you think that?

Manguso: Obsessive behaviors always feel a little dirty don’t they? This was definitely something that I didn’t feel I could stop doing. In the book I talk about this particular day on which a friend of mine offered me a ride from New York back to Boston, back to college and I declined because I thought "Oh God, I have this whole system of getting onto the Greyhound bus and writing in the diary the entire time," the whole four hours that it would take to get from New York back to Boston, and I thought "I’d really rather do that than spend 4 hours with my friend,” which seems insane to me now. I don't know that I would make the same choice now. But at that point I was really enthralled by this need to record. It felt unsafe to put that at risk.

Beck: The friend who offered you a ride back to Boston, he died young, right? I think you say that in the book.

Manguso: Yes, he died young.

Beck: Was that close to the time of that incident?

Manguso: It wasn’t, but in retrospect I can add that fact. Certainly the moment he offered me the ride I had no idea he was going to die at 30. I was in college and I think he just graduated. So we were in our early 20s. This feeling that certainly attended my middle class privilege at the time was that we weren’t going to die young. We weren’t living in poverty, nobody was at risk of coming to a violent early end, and I just thought, "Eh I’ll take the bus, I can always spend time with so-and-so because we’re going to live forever right?" It just seemed that everything would be the same forever and ever at that point. And then of course it isn’t. One learns this gradually and then suddenly.