"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.