On Not Knowing

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Emily Ogden's On Not Knowing is at once a memoir and suite of pointed inquiries. Her brief, sharply observed essays invite the reader to think with her about problems she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Ogden moves nimbly across registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle, from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, from kayaking near a whale to psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Unapologetically personal in its range of reference and idiosyncratic in its canon, On Not Knowing takes for its subject neither a life nor a library, but a cherished world. Ultimately, Ogden wants to teach herself to resist the temptation of knowingness: to encounter passionate love, well remembered art, and the new lives of her children without forearming herself with a sense that these things are already understood. Committed, as a scholar, to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness is, for her, a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. These essays want to learn with us to resist the temptation to cling to the wall at the edge of the pool, and instead to swim"--