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Her Last Death: A Memoir
by Susanna Sonnenberg
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Synopses & Reviews Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why.
Glamorous, charismatic and a compulsive liar, Susanna's mother seduced everyone who entered her orbit. With outrageous behavior and judgment tinged by drug use, she taught her child the art of sex and the benefits of lying. Susanna struggled to break out of this compelling world, determined, as many daughters are, not to become her mother.
Sonnenberg mines tender and startling memories as she writes of her fierce resolve to forge her independence, to become a woman capable of trust and to be a good mother to her own children. Her Last Death is riveting, disarming and searingly beautiful. Review: "Sonnenberg's curse is her beautiful self-centered and crazy mother, who lies continually, does drugs and navigates through the world with sex as her sole point of reference. Her father is cold and distant. Add in abundant family money, and you have the story of a young girl who grows up in a world of privilege, abuse and despicable behavior all around. Readers get a good dose of drug use, foul language, manipulative behaviors, an accounting of Sonnenberg's affair with her high school English teacher and one chapter titled 'Sex with Everybody.' The freelance writer's story is titillating, and her writing is strong and clear, though the power is diluted when she blurs the lines of nonfiction: 'I have conflated or changed some events and dialogue, and created occasional composites.' Readers not bothered by the conceit will likely follow along through the outrageous and nasty operational tactics of Sonnenberg's mother until the story line leads to her redemption." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Reading 'Her Last Death' by Susanna Sonnenberg has been like spending three days in a monkey house. Sonnenberg, who says she changed all names but her own in this freaky memoir, explains why, when her mother lay in a coma after a terrible car accident and was 'probably going to die,' Susanna, herself a loving mother of two beautiful boys and wife to an honest husband, living an intensely plain, minimum-wage ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) existence in Missoula, Mont., just couldn't find it in her heart to journey to her mother's deathbed in Barbados. To be fair, Susanna may have had more than enough reasons to stay away. Daphne, Susanna's mother, very beautiful, seductive and at times affectionate, was also at times a lying, cheating, shoplifting cocaine addict and pill-head who once locked the teenage Susanna out of a hotel room in Oaxaca, leaving her to walk darkened streets and almost get raped. On Susanna's 16th birthday, Daphne took her and her sister, Penelope, out to a Western bar for margaritas, observed that Susanna fancied the drummer in the band and promised to bring him home later so that Susanna could lose her virginity as a birthday present. But then Daphne had sex with the drummer herself, making sure to leave the door open. Too bad Bette Davis isn't still alive. You remember those old movies where the great scene-chomping actresses got to play both the good twin and the evil twin who yelled at each other by means of (fairly primitive) special effects? Well, as a movie, 'Her Last Death' would enable some heavy-breathing actress to star in three roles, one as the gorgeous, ape-crazy mother, and then two more as the totally self-absorbed, sexually competitive, equally beautiful daughters, all duking it out for — what? For who's going to get center stage, the most attention, the drummer in the band. Of course, the author doesn't portray herself in quite that manner. She sees herself from the beginning as an innocent, loving type. After Penelope's birth, she remembers, 'My little sister howled except when I carried her around. ... When Penelope could stay upright, I sat her in the dirt of our communal back garden and played with her. ... I gathered her up when our nurse called us in.' But the Eden of Penelope and Susanna's childhood seems to have been tainted. 'Bob Dylan lived next door,' Sonnenberg writes, and Henry Fonda, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Claudette Colbert and Lauren Bacall float fleetingly through this memoir. Susanna's parents separate early, and at first there seems to be plenty of family money. In Monte Carlo her maternal grandmother fretfully complains to Daphne about the children, 'Won't they even try a taste of caviar?' But after another fight over money, and not getting enough of it from her ex-husband, Daphne, who by now has been a cabdriver and raped, turns up at Susanna's school just as she's learning to read, picks up little Penelope from preschool, then announces brightly that she's been diagnosed with leukemia, and that the three of them are going to drive from the East Coast to see the Grand Canyon, and not to worry — she's just shoplifted sleeping bags and heavy winter coats for them from Bloomingdale's. And of course there is no leukemia. There's just an ever-crazier mother with a hole in her septum from snorting too much coke, a woman who has seizures and gets committed and reports rapes and cancer as routinely as we might mention a string of parking tickets. Susanna goes off to prep school and conducts a year-long affair with an odious professor who has sex with her on his living room rug and tells his wife all about it. Susanna does everything in her power to encourage this state of affairs because she's in the grip of an ever more powerful crush. Meanwhile, her mother blabs on and on to her about who's good in bed, and when Susanna is a freshman at college her mother ruins Parents' Day by whisking her roommate off to Planned Parenthood to get her fitted for a diaphragm and then telling the roommate's parents about the jaunt; the roommate stops speaking to Susanna and then moves out. After graduation and a couple of disastrous affairs, the author follows sturdily in her mother's footsteps: 'I went to bed with everybody. I wanted the sex. ... I said yes and yes and expected to go to bed on the first date. Otherwise I lost interest. ... Sometimes I didn't make it to the first date.' All this because her crazy mother is trying to steal her boyfriends, her life and all the attention. Meanwhile Penelope has grown up to be a sophisticated beauty who has taken to making cutting remarks and stealing a boyfriend or two herself. Sonnenberg seems to have a highly developed hierarchy of sin. Lying is worst. Drugs come in a close second. Sexual stealing comes in third, and the possession of material wealth follows soon after. She eventually finds an honest man, moves to Missoula, takes those minimum-wage jobs, has those two sons and suffers greatly from the physical privations involved in manual labor, pregnancy and housework. Then comes the phone call saying that her mother is dying. Sonnenberg doesn't go to the bedside. Her sister stops speaking to her (and gets stuck with all the onerous hospital care). But, says Sonnenberg, 'I had made an impossible decision, which unearthed the true calamity of being daughter to this mother.' In other words, her mother made her do it. And, yes, her mother had no more sense of propriety and boundaries than a rhesus monkey. But Sonnenberg has gone on to write this semi-pornographic, sizzling but pious memoir for her sons to read. And even though she's changed their names, they'll probably recognize the material." Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "[T]he wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book that captures the chaos and confusions of her youth." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Review: "Tragic but arresting — a worthy companion to Simone de Beauvoir's and Vivian Gornick's explorations of the complicated mother-daughter dynamic." Kirkus Reviews Review: "An irresistible book that is shimmering with life and the portrait of a glorious, frenzied, seductive woman who of necessity has been left, along with Susanna Sonnenberg's young womanhood, behind. Her mother." James Salter, author of Last Night and Burning the Days Review: "There's shame in these pages, and an artful floundering for acceptance and understanding. Also, as in her tender memory of her mother scooping her shivering, 3-year-old body out of the bathtub and wrapping her tight in a warm towel, there's beauty." (Grade: B+) Entertainment Weekly Review: " Her Last Death is an emotional thriller. It is a manual for men and smart, searching individuals of any age or economic levels. For most of the book it is a disturbing story, yet at the end you might feel like cheering. It is a beautiful, beautiful book and I plan to give it to my nearest and dearest." Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and Teacher ManReview: "Riveting, sexy, smart, and brazenly honest, Her Last Death is a memoir that demands and rewards total immersion. I couldn't put it down, didn't want to, and was sorry when it was over. Susanna Sonnenberg is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvelous debut." John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road and Claire MarvelSynopsis: A searing, beautifully written, and compulsively readable memoir by a daughter who grew up with a narcissistic and addictive mother. Sonnenberg mines her painful and often startling memories as she examines her struggle to break free of her mothers all-consuming influence.
About the Author Susanna Sonnenberg was born in London in 1965 and grew up in New York. Her essays have appeared in Elle, O, the Oprah Magazine and Parenting, among other magazines. She lives in Montana with her husband and two sons.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780743291095
- Author:
- Sonnenberg, Susanna
- Publisher:
- Scribner Book Company
- Subject:
- Personal Memoirs
- Subject:
- Women
- Subject:
- Mothers and daughters
- Subject:
- Problem families
- Copyright:
- 2008
- Edition Description:
- Trade paper
- Publication Date:
- October 2008
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 273
- Dimensions:
- 8 x 5.25 in
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