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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Something lacking:
Having had a wife who suffered sexual abuse from a stepfather as child, I could not stop reading this book from the first chapter. It hit too close to home. The author's prose is crisp, sharp, and vivid, but therein may lie the rub. I could never quite get a feel for how this insane mother truly affected her emotions and world view. She writes almost in a distant and third person non-emotional state, as if recording this had happened to another person. Sure, she describes how her mother's pathological... more info
Hard to put down:
I read and read and when I wasn't reading I was thinking about when I could continue reading. I really admire Susanna for stating her true feelings. She doesn't come across as being a victim; her writing style comes across as a matter of fact.
She tells about her dysfunctional relationship with her mother and father and their many relationships after the divorce. She also tells about her much needed sexual attention from men. Over all I think it's one of the better memoirs that I've read.
pretentious, voyeuristic and self-serving description of the consequences of parental abuse:
I cannot join the rhapsody of praise critics have lavished on Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir, "Her Last Death." Initially I felt pity for the author, but soon enough, compassion changed to contempt, engagement became indifference. Sonnenberg is the daughter of enormously wealthy and spiritually bankrupt parents, and her youth was spent in astonishing material affluence. As if to compensate for the surfeit of money surrounding Susanna, her parents proved to be incompetent, emotionally distant and cruel,... more info
Hard to finish...:
This was an awful book. The author is a narcissist who never manages to fully develop any thought. I actually felt sorry for the author's mother at the end because I disliked her so much. I was relieved when I finally finished the book...
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