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Siempre Susan (2013)

by Sigrid Nunez(Favorite Author)

3.66 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

ERRATA NATURAE

review 1: Nunez was hired by Sontag to help her sort out her correspondence in the mid-1970s. The memoir reveals Sontag to be a complex individual, often brilliant but often needy and petulant. Nunez became romantically involved with Sontag's son, which makes their relationship more complicated. The memoir is brief, but as one reviewer noted, there is a lot going on, perhaps a reflection of the brief but intense period during which Nunez knew Sontag.
review 2: Because I enjoyed reading Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Last of Her Kind, when I saw Sempre Susan on the “new non-fiction” shelf of the Chicago Public Library, I thought it would be worth reading. The subject of this memoir is the late, iconic intellectual, writer and activist Susan Sontag; and it centers spec... moreifically on when Nunez met Sontag in 1976---they were ages 25 and 43, respectively. It was fun to read that Sontag believed in reading one book a day and that her personal library consisted of literally thousands of physical books! From Nunez’s non-idealized portrait, I understood Sontag to be brilliant, ambitious, generous, and idiosyncratic; someone whose insecurities translated into exaggeration, and, often an imposition of her body and ideas in the lives of others. It’s likely that any fierce [American] woman intellectual who emerged on the New York scene in the late 1960s and early 70s came across like a force of nature even if that wasn’t her style. While Sontag had “elite” tastes, and privileged European male intellectuals, she had no shortage of friends, lovers, and admirers throughout her adult life. Nunez writes of her mentor in a very candid, fluid, respectful, and thought-provoking style that makes me consider returning to Sontag’s texts---which I found too cool and impenetrable for my taste when I’ve tried to read them in the past. less

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