Her Last Death: A Memoir
by Susanna Sonnenberg
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Book Reviews of Her Last Death: A Memoir
Book Review: Memoir at its best
Summary: 5 Stars
In HER LAST DEATH, Susanna Sonnenberg achieves what I believe the very best memoirs can accomplish. She paints a vivid, living picture, not just of a life but of her relationship with her manic but unbalanced mother, and she does so with prejudice and personal perspective. Memoir is not autobiography; at its very best, the genre tells us not the facts and objective observation of the events. Memoir takes us into the heart of the author's experience, and it is its very subjectivity that gives it power. HER LAST DEATH brings the reader into Sonnenberg's internal world, a tumultuous place where both a mother's love and her sanity are always in question.
Sonnenberg doesn't flinch from the light when it comes to examining her own stumbles and weaknesses, and when an understanding of her troubled mother's psyche eludes her, as it often does, the author doesn't engage in conjecture or armchair psychoanalysis. Instead, she allows us to experience this inexplicable world with her, and in the end, we are left not so much with a sense of who her mysterious mother might have been, but rather whom the author has ultimately become.
In the course of facing a difficult past and its ramifications for her future, Susanna Sonnenberg has shown herself to be an extremely talented writer, and I eagerly await more from her.
Book Review: Powerful look into a life with a rough start, but a smooth ending
Summary: 4 Stars
Its hard to call a book like this a good book, or to even say that I enjoyed it. I would recommend it though, to anyone who can appreciate a candid life story.
I always feel like a lot can be learned about people from memoirs like this. Susanna Sonnenberg provides an intimate look into the lives of the people who shaped her.
Her mother, a whirlwind woman with a drug habit and an unending sex drive. A woman that likes to pretend she is dying. She loves to be the center of attention, at the cost of everyone around her if necessary.
Her father, a genius writer that expects his toddler to appreciate the classics and berates her for not always taking the intellectual path. When she is older he discounts every accomplishment she makes. As a result, Susanna finds herself always seeking male approval, and all too frequently in the arms of her married english teachers.
Susanna doesn't manage to avoid partaking in risky behaviors, she is a product of her raise. When she starts to realize the pattern she is creating, endless partners and a path of self destruction, she winds up making a big change.
Despite the cards being heavily stacked against our author, she managed to find a normal, and happy life, in a place she never would have predicted she could end up in.
Book Review: The spirit of truth
Summary: 4 Stars
Even though Sonnenberg has obscured so many facts and is so careful to protect identities that I think it has really inhibited some essential elements, the spirit of truth is there. I say this as someone who has a lived a version of her life, child of a brilliant but disturbed bipolar parent. In early life the lay of the land and the nature of reality is heavily influenced by your caretakers. If they are insane or addicted, the experience of feeling one's way around the 'normal' world can be unsettling to say the least. The author really nails those sensations when she is in more healthy 'normal' settings of friends and school. The ambivalence of deeply loving someone who harms you is also conveyed beautifully, in my opinion. Emotions aren't black and white, but the damage these disturbed parents wreak on their offspring is very real and lasting. I found the book spellbinding, could ruefully relate to much of it, and am dying to see pictures of the mother depicted here. I have found out she is still living, along with some of the other family members. If you too had a less than Leave it to Beaver upbringing, particularly if you are a child of parents in perpetual adolescence, you will appreciate the book.Book Review: Freak Show
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm not really sure why a publisher felt that this book would make compelling reading. If this sordid tale had to be told, it seemed much better suited to a long feature in Cosmo or another one of those titillating women's magazines that pretends to contain serious journalism.
This memoir was just nasty, populated by the biggest collection of freaks I've recently seen on the printed page. This so called mother was insane and abusive and I cannot understand why she was permitted to keep custody of these girls.
And I'm not sure why the author felt she had to throw her life open to the world. It was embarrassing to read her accounts of masturbation, indiscriminate sexual behavior, and her attempts to justify one of the most selfish abortions I've ever heard of.
The only positive thing I can say is that I absolutely understand her refusal to fly all those miles to say goodbye to that waste of an egg donor who was lucky to live as long as she did. I wouldn't have crossed the street to say anything to her. But this book was really a waste of time and left me feeling like I was coated with a thin layer of slime after reading it.
Book Review: Mediocre at Best
Summary: 2 Stars
Like many other readers, I never found the mother that atrocious. I mean, sure, she did have some bizarre and harmful behavior. However, I don't see her as the ravaging beast that Sonnenberg describes her as. She was a coke addict which caused her to be in the hospital a lot and sometimes to go into hysterical fits. While this would definitely be scary, Sonnenberg doesn't describe her mother's frequent hospital visits as frightening but more as expected inconveniences. She definitely wasn't physically abused considering most parents give some form of minimal corporal punishment. The verbal abuse was certainly there but not to the point of traumatizing Sonnenberg, more to the point of making it difficult for her to get along with her mother. Although Sonnenberg's mother has an interesting personality as a histrionic and her overly sexual behavior, I really don't believe that her story was interesting enough to warrant an entire memoir. In fact, at times, I felt Sonnenberg's story ( her affair with the English teacher) was more interesting than her mother's and that she used her own story to fill in gaps in which nothing significant happened with her mother.