'The Two Kinds of Decay' by Sarah Manguso - Review - NYTimes.com

THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY

By Sarah Manguso.

184 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.

In her second year of college, the poet Sarah Manguso developed a neurological disease so uncommon it doesn't even have a real name. The autoimmune condition, a rarer form of the already rare Guillain-Barré syndrome, is known as chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, and it took more than four years to run its course. For several of them, Manguso had to undergo periodic treatments in which her plasma was completely removed and replaced. The treatments worked, but sometimes only for a few days. Later, she moved to steroid treatments, which restored a degree of physical well-being but created complicated side effects.

In her sharp, affecting new memoir, "The Two Kinds of Decay," Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission. "For seven years I tried not to remember much because there was too much to remember," she writes. From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like "heavenly bodies" that "fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names." Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Mitchell-t.html?fta=y