David Shields is the author of ten books, including, most recently, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010) and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a New York Times best seller. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor of English at the University of Washington. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

Sarah Manguso’s most recent books are the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (FSG, 2008) and the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s, 2007), which was included in One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Fairfield University. Her books have been published in five countries.

Shields read Manguso; Manguso read Shields; they began a correspondence. This conversation was culled from a series of obsessive email volleys that took place throughout 2009 and began before the correspondents had met in person. In distinctively plot-blind fashion, neither of them remembers at what point in the conversation they finally met, or whether it had any effect on any quality of the ongoing conversation. In any case, it’s still going on.

I. “NOTHING BUT EPIPHANIES”

SARAH MANGUSO: Much of elementary school confused me, but it was the drivel that everyone seemed to find worthwhile to share in show-and-tell that was most puzzling. After every show-and-tell session, after being prodded by one of the fifteen other pupils, Mrs. Birkholz would say, “Sarah Jane will participate in show-and-tell when she has something to say.” I felt I was letting them. My classmates accused me of withholding, but I had nothing to say to them. In order of increasing mystery: the silence of withholding, the silence of stuttering, the silence of aphasia, and the silence of no content.

DAVID SHIELDS: Those last four phrases describe not only my book Dead Languages—autobiographical novel about growing up with a stutter—but also pretty much my life till now. That is just an extremely strong trope for me: the wound and the bow. The rupture that created the desire to write and—as I’ve come to see—describes the field of my aesthetic: my interest in short bursts of articulation, in consciousness, in communication, miscommunication.

SM: I like this line of yours from Enough About You: “I took my father’s halting speech and turned it into a full-blown stutter.”

DS: One of my proudest accomplishments of middle age is that I now give readings without any chemical assistance, as I did for years.

SM: You’ve said that memoir belongs to literature, not...