In 2008, Harris Wulfson, Manguso’s longtime friend, walked out of a mental hospital and into the path of an oncoming train. It was two days before his body was identified. In this affecting narrative, poet and writer Manguso (The Two Kinds of Decay) threads selected remembrances into an elegy—for Harris, who was a musician and composer, kind and funny and capable of behaving badly, but also an elegy for youth, that time of unstable arrangements and shifting roommates; for Manguso’s past, filled with illness and suicidal thoughts; and, perhaps most of all, for a friendship. Manguso reminds us that long friendships are a palimpsest of love and disappointment and memory; old friends are a compass for one’s life. Manguso puzzles over the thought of what becomes of a friend after death? as well as feelings of grief, guilt, and anger, and what separates the mentally ill from the rest of us (less than we think, she concludes). In the end, Manguso writes with assured and poetic prose. (Mar.)
“Memoirs about grief often concern a relative or partner, but Manguso's offers a revealing perspective on simple friendship and on a formative period of early adulthood when choices are made and selfhood solidifies.” —The New Yorker
“‘Nobody understands how I feel,' we often think (mistakenly) in times of loss. But Manguso not only understands, she can articulate it in the precisest and most unexpected of images--an unrelated car accident, a bowl of Italian candies, a swim in the ocean. What results is a memoir that reveals not the just intimacies of the writer's life, but of your own. Most moving is that The Guardians covers a subject so rarely recognized in our society, the grief from the death of a friend.” —Leigh Newman, Oprah.com, "Book of the Week"
“Sarah Manguso's The Guardians goes to hell and back . . . The book majors in bone-on-bone rawness, exposed nerve endings . . . With The Guardians, I did something I do when I love a book: start covering my mouth when I read; this is very pure and elemental, and I wanted nothing coming between me and the page.” —David Shields, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A bittersweet elegy to a friend who ‘eloped' from a locked psychiatric ward . . . [Manguso] explores the extent to which we are our friends' guardians and, in outliving them, the guardians of their memory . . . Manguso's writing manages, in carefully honed bursts of pointed, poetic observation, to transcend the darkness and turn it into something beautiful. The results are also deeply instructive, not in the manner we've come to fatuously call "self-help" but in the way that good literature expands and illuminates our realm of experience. ” —Heller McAlpin, Barnes and Noble Review
“Shortly after returning home from a fellowship year in Rome, poet and memoirist Sarah Manguso received word that her old college friend Harris had fled a psychiatric hospital and jumped in front of a train. In The Guardians: An Elegy, the writer explores, in prose that singes with precision and honesty, the many ambiguities surrounding the tragedy . . . A long friendship is a crucial orientation point, and Manguso captures with great delicacy the spinning compass of her grief, and its accompanying jumble of anger, disappointments, corrupted memories--and love.” —Megan O'Grady, Vogue
“Packs an emotional wallop into small, patterned movements.” —The Onion A.V. Club
“In The Guardians, Sarah Manguso holds up two kinds of love: the love for someone willfully at one's side (the new husband) and the love for someone willfully gone (the dear friend, a suicide). The limitations and complexities of romantic love played out in the present are here haunted on all sides by the simple expansiveness of platonic love, especially as seen through the lens of mourning. The living cannot compete with the dead. But marriage has its rights before any friendship. The mystery of where Manguso's heart will land propels us through this vivid meditation.” —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?
“Sarah Manguso's is a disarming and yet infectiously charming style, one that mixes intimate personal reflection with curiously distanced observations of the world. What this ends up feeling like while reading The Guardians is a tension that's both inviting and simultaneously alienating, a wounded sort of intellect that wants to protect and yet expose itself to the reader. It's a beautifully sad meditation--as exhilarating as it is devastating.” —John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain
“Manguso is a deliberate and exact stylist….At her best, she has some of Didion's rhythms, her watchfulness and remove, her way of drawing attention to her own fragility….A fiercely personal book.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
How does the suicide of a friend affect someone who has come perilously close to suicide herself? That's the question Manguso (The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, 2008, etc.) wrestles with in this purgative memoir. The friend was Harris, a brilliant but troubled musician who escaped from a psychiatric ward in 2008 and threw himself in front of an oncoming train. No stranger to depression herself, Manguso attempts to figure out her friend's motivation. Was it a reaction to an antipsychotic drug known to make patients maddeningly restless? How did he leave the facility so easily? Could she have saved him? What if she had married him? Could he have lived a happy life, or would it always have been one of "unendurable suffering"? As in The Two Kinds of Decay, which recalled her own debilitating struggle with a rare illness, Manguso is adept at breaking her memories into small, vivid pieces. She scrutinizes everything from the language of death to her own close relationship to it: "I say I'm interested in life, but really I want to play a little game with Death. I want to lie down next to him and smell his infected breath." The author displays brave writing throughout, but she is also self-absorbed. She is so fascinated and fixated on trying to palpate the contours of her own grief that the subject gets lost. Who is Harris? Ultimately, this so-called elegy is more about the author than the subject. Manguso is an intriguing, talented writer, but this book is missing something vital. It has the weight of the author's loss without the weight of her experience.
