On Not Knowing

A beautifully written suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing.

“In On Not Knowing, a book of seventeen brief and edifying essays, [Ogden] uses her knowledge to illuminate the ‘dimness’ in which she spends most of her time: the messy uncertainty of daily life, which she has recently begun to spend with her young twin boys. Her illumination does not dispel this dimness, but instead casts a halo around it, demonstrating the value of circling the uncertain.” —The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? Written by English professor Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love.

Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the 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 a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of willful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defenselessness of not knowing yet—possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.

“Right now, our political and aesthetic discourse seems less a genuine conversation than a competition of mutually exclusive certainties. How wonderful it is to read Ogden, a writer who says that ‘the question mark’s business with me will never be finished’ and means it.” —The Atlantic

“On Not Knowing is many things: a brilliant close reading of motherhood; a tonic counter to ‘self-help’ books; an intimate, unsentimental tribute to children; and an extended riff on how we make meaning with language. What is most extraordinary is how Ogden takes a surface moment of the everyday and deftly turns and deepens it until she arrives at a space of luminous complexity.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward: A Novel