Her Last Death: A Memoir

Her Last Death: A Memoir
by Susanna Sonnenberg

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Book Summary Information

Author: Susanna Sonnenberg
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-10-07
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Scribner

Book Reviews of Her Last Death: A Memoir

Book Review: Review by David Allan Reeves author of "Running Away From Me"
Summary: 5 Stars

Running Away From Me

It's my opinion that a good memoir should be half-art and half-psychotherapy. It should be sad at times and funny at others and mine all the motions in between. "Her Last Death" by Susanna Sonnenberg does just that. It's about the author's unconventional relationship with her drug-addicted, eccentric mother, who would rather be her daughter's friend, but is ultimately neither. She's a compulsively lying, shoplifting, scandalous, attention-seeking, spoiled-rich monstrosity instead. But with all her drug use, it would be impossible to be a good mother. The two really can't co-exist. If I could defend the mother's indefensible behavior, I would say that she's not a bad person who needs to be good, but a sick person who needs to get well. It's hard to separate the inexplicable behavior of the addict from the person her or she truly is. All we see is the behavior. I felt Sonnenberg's intense pain, humiliation, and conflicted love for her mother, but as a recovering addict, I also felt the mother's hurt. No one does that to themselves without feeling some degree of strong, psychic agony.

I can't say that I didn't feel much disgust as I read this story, for both mother and daughter, but that's proof of how well Sonnenberg writes honestly about her life. She definitely wasn't trying to paint a pretty picture, and it didn't seem contrived and pretentious like some memoirs I've read. She just put it all out there to let us be the judge. Every twenty pages or so I had to turn the book over and look at her picture on the back, trying to match the details of her life to her face, as if it should all be plain to see in her eyes.

I was thoroughly disappointed when I came to the end only because I wanted more. I wanted things to be neatly tied up at the end. But "Her Last Death" is about life and not about things that are neatly tied up at the end.

Running Away From Me

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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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