Two Kinds of Decay

By Sarah Manguso
192 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 $22.00

Reviewed by Nicki Laskowski

At the age of 21, Sarah Manguso came down with what appeared to be a common cold. But slowly the cold symptoms became more severe, and Manguso began to lose the feeling in her feet and hands and then her legs and arms. She was slowly becoming paralyzed. Doctors’ visits led to an eventual diagnosis: Manguso had chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIPD), a no-name disease where the immune system essentially attacks the body’s nerve cells. For nine years, when Manguso should have been pulling all-nighters, dreaming of a better tomorrow and having flirty encounters with boys, she found herself in and out of the hospital, sometimes weeks at a time, sometimes completely bedridden.

Nearly a decade after her diagnosis, Manguso decided to revisit her sickness.

“The disease has been in remission for seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember,” she writes.

Manguso reveals that she kept a haphazard journal through this time in her life with notes here and there, sometimes detailed, other times nonexistent.

And so, her book Two Kinds of Decay is not a day-by-day diary account of her illness. Instead, it truly is a memoir – a collection of snapshots or sketches – told in the order she remembers them and not in the order they may have transpired.

She chronicles how we can rationalize away the beginning signs of illness until the sickness is so apparent, it can't be ignored. And she struggles against a limited language of disease filled with hollow clichés that don’t really tell anything.

Her writing is sparse but dense with the style of a storyteller and the sensibility and structure of a poet. Each chapter in this thin volume of work is a vignette of sorts, which has the ability to stand on its own as a singular image. Together, as one chapter stacks on top of the next, Manguso brings the reader into a world colored by loneliness and isolation, humor and poignancy, hopelessness and strength.