Though Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day.—M. Rebekah Otto, Salon Top Ten Books of 2012

Sarah Manguso’s slim memoir The Guardians is both a searing account of a college friend’s suicide and an elegy for an entire generation.—Catherine Taylor, Telegraph Best Books of 2012

What makes this book so revelatory, what sets it apart from the seemingly endless succession of recent grief memoirs, is that it all seems to happen in real time. The Guardians is like a Polaroid, developing while you watch. … What happens when there are two people, and then one of them dies? The truth is, I don’t know how to review this book, because I’ve never read anything like it.—Morgan Macgregor, The Los Angeles Review of Books