The Two Kinds of Decay Book

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.

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