The Guardians An Elegy for a Friend [Paperback]

An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night, reported the July 24, 2008, edition of theRiverdale Press. This man was named Harris, andThe Guardianswritten in the years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and ended his lifeis Sarah Manguso's heartbreaking elegy.

Harris was a man who played music, wrote software, wrote music, learned to drive, went to college, went to bed with girls. InThe Guardians, Manguso grieves not for family or for a lover, but for a best friend. With startling humor and candor, she paints a portrait of a friendship between a man and a womanin all its unexpected detailand shows that love and grief do not always take the shapes we expect them to.

1. Who are the guardians referred to in the book's title? Why would an elegy be named not for the dead person but for those left behind?

2. Discuss the special traits of this book's form, such as the author's use of short sections, repeated words and phrases, and dense, distilled narratives. What makes her unique structure appropriate for the topic? In what way is Manguso's skill as a poet evident in her prose?

3. How does Manguso's experience of grief accompany her experience of courtship and marriage?

4. One of the defining traits of Manguso's grief is its frequent refusal to proceed linearly toward what could be called recovery. How does the book represent that meandering path?

5. Grieving a suicide is different from other griefs. There is an extra mystery besides the mystery of death. How does Manguso manage this component of her grief? Does she seem to find solace in the exercise?

6. How does Manguso's depiction of her grief differ from other memoirs on this topic?

7. At the end of the book, Manguso tells us, It's tempting to try to claim I've learned something very important from the experience of Harris's death. In the past, have you learned anything fl³4