Full name: The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir

Author: Sarah Manguso Year: 2008 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Memoirs, Non Fiction, Health, Poetry, Science Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780374280123 9780312428440 0374280126 0312428448

At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, 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 struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, depression, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be. Similar books: The Stardust Lounge by Deborah Digges What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas This Lovely Life by Vicki Forman Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T. Kira Madden No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey Half a Life by Darin Strauss The Only Girl in the Car by Kathy Dobie Love Life by Rob Lowe Fat Girl by Judith Moore Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot A Match to the Heart by Gretel Ehrlich Sky of Stone by Homer Hickam Life in a Day by Doris Grumbach Townie by Andre Dubus Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso Complications by Atul Gawande My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor Endurance by Scott Kelly What the Eyes Don't See by Mona Hanna-Attisha