Her Last Death: A Memoir
by Susanna Sonnenberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Susanna SonnenbergEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-07
ISBN: 0743291093
Number of pages: 273
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of Her Last Death: A Memoir
Book Review: Susanna's the Real Deal
Summary: 5 Stars
I met Susanna when I took a writing workshop from her in Montana. She's one of the most kind and generous women I have had the pleasure of meeting. I immediately bought her book and read it through in just a couple of days, which means I could not put it down. Many times people who write memoirs do so because they look back on a life that was very unusual and understand how it helped shape their thinking and decision making, sometimes to their own undoing. They know they have changed and wonder if their experience may help someone else. People who read memoirs are curious, sometimes because they have gone through similar experiences and sometimes because they haven't. Unfortunately, there are those in the latter category who read a memoir and than pass judgment on what they've read. They judge the writer.
This makes me wonder. What would a memoir be if the writer decided to write about only the things they thought would not offend, or the mistakes they think will be the easiest to stomach. That would be the opposite of what happened in James Frey's book, "A Million Little Pieces." He exaggerated some of his history, but his book still touched many lives and because of that, has value. Susanna has amazing courage and gave me inspiration to be able to tell my own story without the fear of judgment which would be sure to come. Her life is amazing and the fact that she is successful in career, marriage, and motherhood at such a young age after all she went through is truly remarkable to this reader.
Summary of Her Last Death: A Memoir
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.
Susanna's mother gave her a copy of Penthouse when she was a ten-year-old, cocaine when she was 12, and seduced her boyfriend at 14. Sonnenberg recounts "the true calamity of being daughter to this mother." The glory of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and somehow navigated her way to a deftly written book capturing her dismantled youth. The daughter of a glamorous, falling-down addict of a mother and a gifted, self-absorbed father, Sonnenberg never falls into the trap of attempting to analyze two people never meant to be parents. Instead, we are allowed to feel the strange and powerful familial currencies running between mother and daughter through the keenly observed writing of Sonnenberg. The writing is razor-sharp and raw, a significant feat considering the untethered early years of this immensely talented writer. --Molly Jay
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