"The Guardians" is an elegy for Manguso's friend Harris, written two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under a train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded post-college apartment, Manguso's fellowship year in Rome, Harris's death and the year that followed--the year of mourning and the year of Manguso's marriage.

An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night, reported the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press. This man was named Harris, and The Guardians--written in the years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and ended his life--is 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. In The 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 woman--in all its unexpected detail--and shows that love and grief do not always take the shapes we expect them to.