{"id":2616,"date":"2013-02-27T14:53:23","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T18:53:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=2616"},"modified":"2014-01-26T19:44:35","modified_gmt":"2014-01-26T23:44:35","slug":"life-stories-23-sarah-manguso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2013\/02\/27\/life-stories-23-sarah-manguso\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Stories #23: Sarah Manguso"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Life<\/a>
\nphoto: Andy Ryan<\/font><\/p>\n

In this episode of Life Stories<\/i>, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I reunite with Sarah Manguso<\/a>, who I first interviewed back in 2008<\/a> shortly after the publication of her first memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay<\/i><\/a>. When we met then, she mentioned that the recent death of a close friend was becoming the subject of a potential novel—instead, she’s written a short book (“an elegy,” as it’s billed on the cover) called The Guardians<\/i><\/a> as an elegy to her friend Harris.<\/p>\n

We discuss what led Sarah back to non-fiction as she probed her grief, and touch upon the idea of the supernatural as something between metaphor and reality, and I learn about a condition called akathisia that might be described as like restless leg syndrome all over your body—a condition that turns out to be a frequent side effect of certain anti-psychotic medications and which may have contributed to Harris’s condition in the hours before his suicide. I should mention that this conversation was conducted “in the field,” as it were; though the noise removal software made a pretty big difference, you’ll still hear the occasional snatches of music in the background. (The Tom Waits is pretty unmistakable.)<\/p>\n

Listen to Life Stories<\/i> #23: Sarah Manguso<\/a> (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians is a powerful story about coming to terms with the death of a close friend, and an attempt to understand how her friend’s condition had deteriorated so poorly in his final days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272],"tags":[132,305,532,533,534],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2616"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3300,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616\/revisions\/3300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}