A review by zoemig
The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
3.0
"All autoimmune diseases invoke the metaphor of suicide. The body destroys itself from the inside."
The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso is a memoir of her battle with a rare and debilitating disease, a chronic form of Guillain-Barre syndrome called CIDP (Chronic Inflammatory Demvelinating Polyneuropathy) which causes her blood to produce antibodies which attack her nervous system, starting at the peripheral and moving inwards, from her feet and hands to her most vital organs. The treatments that Manguso has to go through during her nine-year battle with the disease are painful and only sometimes effective, from blood cleaning to four and a half years on steroids, even when they help with the disease they often have negative side effects like mood disorders and weight gain.
Manguso's writing has a beautiful lyricism to it, and the memoir is written in bite-sized fragments, often only a couple sentences to a paragraph. I was not surprised when I learned Manguso was also the author of several poetry collections, as The Two Kinds of Decay is filled with poetry, even in the most painful situations Manguso is raw and honest. At one point she even admits that her disease has made her a worse person, bitter instead of compassionate, which she thinks is extremely unfair. It is not a book that is looks for sympathy, it is simply the story of what happened to her and how she coped. Unfortunately at times I found it veered too far into the medical, and the detailed descriptions of painful medical procedures took away from the overall impact of the book. The Two Kinds of Decay is most successful when Manguso talks about the human aspect of her disease, how it impacted her as well as her interactions with others, how it made her into the person she is today, and it is for those passages of honesty, of which I wish there was more, that I recommend the book.
The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso is a memoir of her battle with a rare and debilitating disease, a chronic form of Guillain-Barre syndrome called CIDP (Chronic Inflammatory Demvelinating Polyneuropathy) which causes her blood to produce antibodies which attack her nervous system, starting at the peripheral and moving inwards, from her feet and hands to her most vital organs. The treatments that Manguso has to go through during her nine-year battle with the disease are painful and only sometimes effective, from blood cleaning to four and a half years on steroids, even when they help with the disease they often have negative side effects like mood disorders and weight gain.
Manguso's writing has a beautiful lyricism to it, and the memoir is written in bite-sized fragments, often only a couple sentences to a paragraph. I was not surprised when I learned Manguso was also the author of several poetry collections, as The Two Kinds of Decay is filled with poetry, even in the most painful situations Manguso is raw and honest. At one point she even admits that her disease has made her a worse person, bitter instead of compassionate, which she thinks is extremely unfair. It is not a book that is looks for sympathy, it is simply the story of what happened to her and how she coped. Unfortunately at times I found it veered too far into the medical, and the detailed descriptions of painful medical procedures took away from the overall impact of the book. The Two Kinds of Decay is most successful when Manguso talks about the human aspect of her disease, how it impacted her as well as her interactions with others, how it made her into the person she is today, and it is for those passages of honesty, of which I wish there was more, that I recommend the book.